Seductions of the Green Saviour
Protecting environment, like the fashionably holy idea of promoting peace, can mean anything to anyone. Little is known about how much greener-than-thou opinion makers in Indian media have weighed inin the May 27 order of Delhi High Court which allowed Greenpeace India to receive fresh domestic donations in two of its accounts and utilize them for day-to-day functioning. Of late, the Indian arm of the international non-governmental organisation (NGO) has been facing the heat as the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) blocked its foreign fundings and suspended its license for six months alleging that the green body "prejudicially affected the public interests and economic interests of the country in violation of the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA)”.
Going by how its sympathisers in some sections of Indian media have been keen to join the chorus assembled by Greenpeace for drumming up support, one could uncharitably suggest that that the order perfectly suits the NGO’s rather melodramatic campaign for staying afloat.
The order has ensured that Greenpeace India is starved enough to claim victimhood (if not persecution) while allowing it enough money to carry on a campaign which is premised on apocalyptic countdown to imminent ‘disaster’ awaiting India’s environment. On its social media platforms, for instance, it can now afford to keep posting its marine analogy of the big fish Indian state gobbling up the small fish of environmental rights while the saviour ( of course, Greenpeace) is running out of time with crippled wings. Such instances of graphic fear-mongering has been amusing and that’s why journalist and novelist Manu Joseph has perceptively dubbed Greenpeace as “the most entertaining NGO in the world.” In one of his recent pieces in The Hindustan Times, he wrote: “Its activists chase and confront oil tankers and whaling trawlers. Some people find it dubious, opaque and anarchic. In the film Armageddon, the character played by Bruce Willis, who works on an offshore oil rig, hits golf balls at Greenpeace activists who are protesting against something, probably the very existence of fossil fuel”.
On May 6 this year, the British press found that Greenpeace, besides its entertaininghyperbole,can also be misleadingly indulgent with facts. All major dailies in Britain reported that a Greenpeace advertisement opposing fracking has been banned by Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), United Kingdom’s independent regulator of advertising across all media, for misleadingly claiming that experts agreed that the process would not cut energy bills.While banning the ad, ASA also directed Greenpeace “to ensure they did not use claims that misleadingly implied their views were universally accepted if a significant division of informed opinion existed.”
Media in India, unsurprisingly, had no space for reporting such regulatory censure of Greenpeace in UK. Interestingly, there is a British connection to why (though not the most important reason), a section of editorial opinion in India naively bought Greenpeace India’s crusade-against-odds story. In January this year, Indian media opinion in general grew sympathetic to the green outfit while reporting Indian authorities' decision to stop Greenpeace activist Priya Pillai from flying to London, where she was going to brief British MPs on how a proposed coal mine by a UK-based company was threatening the livelihoods of local villagers.
Such solidarity was to an extent the result of interpreting the offloading of the activist in terms of regime versus dissent - a match up which often provokes, sometimes constructively too, the free speech enthusiasts to crawl out of the woodwork. Deccan Herald, for instance, remarked that the government’s role in offloading incident “lays bare a deepening anti-democratic streak in its approach to alternative voices, dissenting opinion and activism”.
Also, the subsequent action by the government for blocking Greenpeace India’s foreign funding was viewed as a subtext of larger governmental ploy of clampdown on civil society organisations which has seen, as The Times of India reported on June 10, 2015, the central government blocking the foreign funding of more than 4,000 non-profit organizations over the last couple of months for alleged violation of FCRA provisions. Identifying such trend as early as January this year, The Indian Express had observed: “the social sector should be seen as a partner in the process of development, not a political adversary paid in dollars to lobby for alien agendas and foment dissatisfaction in the countryside".
It’s obvious that after projecting government’s action as a state-civil society conflict, media opinion has awarded the benefit of doubt to Greenpeace. It has done so in other ways too. One such way has been how different media reports have claimed to have unearthed the hidden agenda behind the government’s action against Greenpeace. Different reports have somehow inferred that the central government is keen on weeding out hurdles to coal mining and coal based industrial production, crucial to Modi’s government’s plans for boosting industrial output, and hence, Greenpeace has been targeted for its campaigns against the coal mining industry. Justin Rowallt, South Asia correspondent for BBC, claimed to have cracked the case with the same explanation and reported with a rather screaming headline ‘Why India’s government is targeting Grenpeace’ (May 16).
The BBC was perhaps trying to develop a theory in context of a report filed by Sanjoy Majumder five days before on its website. The story, which could also easily be confused with a write up in a campaign brochure, was about ‘how villagers of Mahan in Madhya Pradesh, helped by Greenpeace, blocked attempts to mine coal in their forest’. However, it was Sajai Jose from data journalism initiative IndiaSpend, whose report published in Business Standard , provided the statistical cover for such speculations. Couched in the convenience of selective datato prove a predetermined hypothesis, the report makes a numerical case for attributing the ‘coal motive’ to the attack on Greenpeace.
There is nothing new about Greenpeace co-opting Indian journalists in attacking India’s coal industry. It funded journalist Paranjoy Guha Thakurta’s documentary film ‘Coal Curse’ (2013) and he was one of the signatories to a recent letter ( April 21, 2015) written by civil society ‘activists’ to the Union Minister of Home Affairs expressing solidarity with Greenpeace and opposing freezing of its bank accounts and blocking of its foreign funds.
While building a case against coal mining in India, what Greenpeace perhaps does not realise is that it will not be easy to sell their saviour role to a huge segment of population who expect to benefit from coal powered industries and facilities. Unlike vocal activists, people would put Greenpeace to a tougher test, as Manu Joseph says, “A Scandinavian liberal who is donating in some form to Greenpeace India is indulging in an exercise of facile moral fulfilment without having to face the consequences of adversely affecting a coal mining project in India. But Indian citizens, who have a high stake in India’s capacity to generate electricity or in protecting its environment, would evaluate Greenpeace with greater scrutiny and severity”. Also, there are people who would also lend government an ear and consider a situation, as Manu Joseph describes, “it is possible that the Greenpeace funds are from the fronts of some governments, or corporations that want to harm the interests of other corporations.” Benefit of doubt, sometimes, can tilt the other way too.
What’s insidious isn’t that the Greenpeace has found supporters in editorial space and news time--that’s as much Greenpeace’s right to be heard as it’s media’s freedom to take positions and have opinions.The danger is deeper--it lies in blurring of lines between journalistic accounts and self –righteous activism. It can be delusional. In August last year, Michael Specter profiled activist Vandana Shiva in The New Yorker magazine and clinically revealed how she has been exaggerating figures for farmer suicides in Maharashtra, including blamingbiotechnology company Monsanto and its monopoly on genetically modified cotton for the suicides, and how she has been using unethical and dubious means to discredit the very idea of Genetically Modified Organisms( GMO). After the story was published and attracted Vandana Shiva’s indignantrant against Specter, David Remnick ( the magazine’s editor), besides standing firmly with Spectre’s story, wrote a cogent point-by-point rebuttal to the activist’s tirade. In doing so, Remnick restored journalistic prerogative, and more significantly, separated journalistic process from activist fervour.
It’s important that this distinction between activism and issue-driven journalism, if that’s not a loaded term, is understood in media offices in India to guard against dangers of delusion. As, commenting on Vandana Shiva- New Yorker spat in his column, Manu Joseph observed: “In the world of activism, delusion is a gift. The great and the ordinary are separated by this gift.Activism is not filled with the deluded, but it has a special place for them. They do well there because the balance of neutrality does not provide the intensity and drive that a powerful conviction does. An open mind is useless to a revolutionary. An open mind cannot convert other open minds.’’
In times whencontested ideas multiply as fastly as digital platforms, it’s important that converted minds don’t make us believe in apocalypse in a world minus Greenpeace. That’s a danger when journalists stretch their adversial role to stray towards activists’ turf.
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