Greenpeace activist Pillai was 'offloaded' under 'etc' criteria of MHA order

After refusing to reveal under the RTI Act what rule the Intelligence Bureau used to issue a Lookout Circular against Greenpeace activist Priya Pillai, sources in the government have said  the ambiguous ’et cetera’ was used to prevent Pillai from travelling abroad. According to this Indian Express report, the Intelligence Bureau, which issued the Look Out Circular against Pillai, used the ’etc’ category in an internal order of the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) to stop her from flying out of the country. Speaking to the daily, a senior Intelligence Bureau official said: [caption id=“attachment_2059477” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Greenpeace activist Priya Pillai. ANI[/caption] “We were just following the orders of the government. The NGO has been involved in anti-national activities and there was a suspicion her travel was not in national interest," the official said, adding that Pillai’s air ticket was funded by Greenpeace UK, which brought her travel under the scanner. On Tuesday, the Ministry of Home Affairs refused to disclose any information on a purported list of people who are not allowed to travel abroad. The Ministry has now transferred the entire issue to the Intelligence Bureau – an exempted organisation under RTI Act – virtually shutting the doors on such queries. The ministry also refused to provide information held by, it including the provision under which such people are “off loaded” at the time of boarding the flight and whether any complaints have been received by it. After several instances of people being offloaded, including Pillai of Greenpeace and noted Shia scholar Kalbe Jawwad being deboarded from their flights without being given any prior notice, an RTI applicant had sought to know under what law these citizens are not allowed to travel abroad. He also sought to know if there exists a list of Indian nationals who are not allowed to fly abroad, and if so on whose orders the list is prepared, whether the people named in the list are intimated that they cannot fly abroad. The applicant also wanted to know under what law, offloaded is written on the passport of the person being not allowed to fly. After receiving the RTI application, the Home Ministry said the matter is closely related with the working of Intelligence Bureau. The Bureau of Immigration, which comes under the Intelligence Bureau, had deboarded Pillai who was travelling to London to address the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Indo-British relations about the plans of London-registered company Essar Energy who want to build a coal mine in the Mahan forest in India. The move against Greenpeace and other ‘anti-development’ NGOs came last year supposedly based on an Intelligence Bureayu report suggesting that such NGOs were indulging in anti-national activities. The Home Ministry had then directed the freezing of Greenpeace India’s foreign funds over its alleged activities against corporates engaged in coal mining. Greenpeace India successfully challenged the order in the Delhi High Court which on Tuesday directed the government to unblock foreign funds to the tune of Rs 1.87 crore received by it. However, concerns have been raised about the funding of such NGOs and the larger purpose behind their functioning. As Firstpost senior editor G Pramod Kumar points out in this 2012 earlier article,  there exists another form of policy peddling - lobbying by countless NGOs that receive money from abroad; from 160 countries to be precise. While most of the foreign aid coming to India, estimated to be at 3 percent of the national budget (according to an article by Suvojit Chattopadhyay in Livemint) and roughly 0.7 percent of the GDP (according to some earlier estimates) are loans that need to be repaid, it’s common knowledge that even as loans, they come with a lot of conditions including commercial and foreign policy interests. Suggesting that the activities of NGOs such as Greenpeace were anything but political in nature, Rupa Subramanya, editor-at-large of Swarajya in this piece says Pillai’s address to MPs of a foreign government on matters of domestic Indian policy, is difficult to be interpreted otherwise.  She writes:  

_While I do not myself think it was especially useful for the government to offload Priya Pillai, it is important to insist that the government of a sovereign nation such as India has the right to control the movements of people, including its own nationals, both in and out. Many people take the emigration check as you leave India to be a mere formality, but it is not. You could be offloaded for any number of reasons such as not paying your tax, or even having an old visa missing from your passport._We’re distracted from the real issue by getting bogged down in the minute details of the Pillai case which remains murky and contested. The real question is whether India has a right to be concerned about the potentially damaging effects that foreign-funded NGOs have on India’s development prospects. The answer is most certainly yes. Governments are accountable to the people who elected them, but who exactly are the NGOs like Greenpeace accountable to?

And while the brouhaha over the Intelligence Bureau report on NGOs may be overdone,  we must thank the IB for at least one thing: the debate on the role of NGOs has been opened up, and it needs to continue.