After deciding not to sleep at all before her 6.50am flight out of Delhi, Priya Pillai felt slow and drowsy as she handed her passport over the immigration counter. It was a few hours past midnight on 11 January 2015; Pillai, a campaigner with Greenpeace India, knew that two full weeks of work awaited her in London. At check-in, she had secured an aisle seat, which made her happy. Now, as the official scanned her passport, Pillai sent idle texts to a colleague in Boston and pondered a plan to visit a friend in the north of England for the weekend.

Behind the counter, the official reached for a square of paper and began taking notes. His name was VK Ojha, Pillai remembers, and he looked fresh and alert. He had a neat moustache and wore a white shirt and navy blue trousers. Minutes went by, and Ojha scribbled on.

“Is there a problem?” Pillai asked.

“Yes, ma’am. Please wait here.”

Ojha vanished. From the next counter, a curious official asked for Pillai’s name and, after typing it into his computer, said: “Greenpeace?” Pillai nodded. When Ojha returned, he led Pillai to an office run by the immigration authority. There, he asked Pillai for her passport and told her – most politely, Pillai remembers – that she couldn’t leave the country.

Pillai is a voluble person, and she spent the next four hours demanding explanations from immigration officials. She got none. When an Air India employee came by, he was asked to take Pillai’s luggage off the plane, which terrified her. She thought: “They’ll put drugs in my bags, and they’ll say: ‘This is why we’re arresting you.’”

Pillai was sure that the state was not beyond framing her. Since 2010, she had been part of a Greenpeace group that was protesting the government’s decision to commission new coal mines in the woods of Mahan in central India. She was travelling to London, in fact, to talk to an informal group of British MPs about Mahan and about Essar Energy, an Indian power and fossil fuel giant incorporated in the UK in 2009 and listed briefly on the London Stock Exchange. Essar Energy was one of two companies licensed to mine in Mahan; Greenpeace argued that the filthy process of mining coal would pulverise acres of forest and displace thousands who lived in the area.

The government took a dim view of these protests. Some of Pillai’s colleagues had been arrested in Mahan on flimsy charges that never stuck. Police and intelligence agencies monitored the activists closely; Pillai was sure they were aware of her London trip. “I know my phone has been tapped for years,” she said. “I’ve had experiences [such as] getting on to a train from Delhi to go to Mahan, and even the people there don’t know I’m coming, but the police or the local intelligence people there will call these people in Mahan and say: ‘Priya’s coming, right?’ I’ve had bureaucrats tell me: ‘You should be careful. You’re under surveillance.’”

Greenpeace activist Priya Pillai addressing a protest meeting in Delhi. Photograph: Hindustan Times via Getty Images

A senior immigration official, Sushma Sharma, came to talk to Ojha. Pillai could hear Sharma insisting: “No, I want a fax. Ask for a fax. I won’t do it without a fax.” Ojha sent off for written authorisation from the government to keep Pillai off her flight, and a fax duly arrived. Pillai marched into Sharma’s cabin and said: “I need to know what’s happening.”

“It’s nothing personal against you,” Sharma said. “But we have orders. Your name is part of a database. That is why I cannot allow you to travel.”

Pillai and Sharma argued until 8.30am, when Pillai got her passport back, now with a big red-and-blue “Offload” stamp inside. Despite Pillai’s obvious anger, Sharma was patient, but she offered no further information. She only suggested, as Pillai was leaving the airport, that she complain to the Bureau of Immigration. Pillai did this but received no reply. Soon afterwards, though, the government told its version of the tale through anonymous sources, who confided to journalists that India’s Intelligence Bureau (IB) had issued an order a couple of days before her trip, calling her “anti-national” and instructing authorities to stop her at the airport.

Two months after that incident, the Delhi high court declared that the IB order was illegal. During the hearing, the government argued that Pillai, had she gone to London, would have created a “negative image” of her country, which might have discouraged prospective investments in India. The court dismissed this. Pillai’s right to travel, the judge wrote, “cannot be impeded only because it is not in sync with [the] policy perspective of the executive … Criticism, by an individual, may not be palatable; even so, it cannot be muzzled.”

Pillai’s detention was the most visibly punitive episode in a year of high friction between the government and Greenpeace. Since May last year, when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept to victory in the general election, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration has cancelled the licences of nearly 9,000 NGOs receiving some measure of foreign funding, on the grounds that they filed their accounts irregularly. Other NGOs – including the Ford Foundation – were placed on a watchlist, so that every bit of money they received from overseas needed first to be cleared by the home ministry.

A simmering suspicion of foreign influences is written deep into the BJP’s nationalist DNA, and it plays marvellously with its most loyal voters – many of whom proclaim their belief, loudly and often, that western powers are eager to throttle India’s rise. In particular, Modi – who steers his government with stifling control – has never hidden his distaste for NGOs and their “five-star activists”, as he once labelled them. After three days of anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat in 2002, during which around 1,000 people died, NGOs led the accusations that Modi – then Gujarat’s chief minister – abetted the murderous frenzy of Hindu mobs. In June, one of these NGOs, the Sabrang Trust, was placed under investigation for misusing Ford Foundation grants. Sabrang’s co-founder, the activist Teesta Setalvad, had already been harried for several years by the Gujarat government; now she was accused of diverting the money to a publishing firm she owns and runs, and of embezzling funds to buy wine, a BlackBerry, wet wipes, nail clippers and a copy of the David Baldacci thriller Total Control. The prolonged raids and interrogations were so disproportionate to these alleged misdemeanours that they carried the acrid whiff of vendetta.

Even within this hothouse of hostility, no organisation has been lavished with as much unwelcome attention as Greenpeace. State auditors turned up at one of its offices twice to sweat over its books, trying to spot irregularities; British and Australian campaigners were turned away from Indian airports after landing with valid visas; three separate tax notices claim it is millions of rupees in arrears. For a few torrid weeks in April and May, all the money that Greenpeace India had in its bank accounts – those receiving funds from its international parent, but also those holding funds raised in India – was frozen, asphyxiating its operations and raising the prospect of an imminent demise. When a court granted Greenpeace a reprieve by releasing its domestic funds, another government order placed its registration as an NGO under review. “We’re very sure there’s a pattern,” Binu Jacob, Greenpeace India’s fundraising director, told me. “They’re getting all their mechanisms together to do this.”

Within the Indian glossary of political derision, the term for a certain sort of old-fashioned leftist is jholawala – after the modest cloth bag, with a long strap slung from shoulder to waist, in which such an individual might carry pamphlets to a protest march or poetry reading. The term applies to liberal intellectuals, NGO workers, and activists – not to mock their meagre finances, but to deflate the staged asceticism of people who are presumed to be well off. In the worldview of Modi and his supporters, the jholawalas are bracketed with other objects of suspicion: the entrenched power elites of Delhi; the liberal media and the politicians of the Congress party; Marxists and academics and foreigners who comment upon Indian affairs. It is not the ideologies or the credentials of these people that come under attack; it is their loyalties, which are suspected to be invested in each other, or in foreign governments, or in international bodies with shadowy agendas. This rhetoric against them has become rooted, knowingly and successfully, in the potent notion of trust. Judgments about who can be trusted to mean well for India, and who cannot, have become a crucial part of government policy.

A Greenpeace demonstaration in Bangalore

earlier this year. Photograph: Jagadeesh Nv/EPA/Corbis

In May, I spent a few days at the main Greenpeace India office, which occupies all four floors of a squat building on a quiet street in the city of Bangalore, Karnataka. It was a strange, unsettled time. Greenpeace’s funds had been frozen the previous month, and its executive director, Samit Aich, revealed that he had no money to pay salaries in June. Every morning, Greenpeace employees – nearly 340 of them across India – received an email update about the legal battle to wrest back their money. Campaigns had seized up. Nobody travelled anywhere. People still held meetings, in long rooms with names such as “Rosa” and “Mandela”; they tramped up and down the stairs, called donors and stared into their computers. But a sense of suspended animation was inescapable. I sat in a small room on the ground floor, talking to Greenpeace staffers about their organisation even as it seemed, day by day, to be melting away around us.

The first inkling Aich had of the troubles ahead came in June 2014, when a 23-page Intelligence Bureau report on foreign-funded NGOs and their “concerted efforts … to ‘take down’ Indian development projects” was leaked to the media. The report had been commissioned by the previous government, led by the Congress party. A PDF of the report that can be found online is marked “Secret”; it warns that NGOs are stalling new mines, power plants, genetically modified food and “mega industrial projects”. Foreign donors, the report alleges, disguise their funds “cleverly … as donations for issues ranging from human rights, violence against women, caste discrimination, religious freedom, etc.” Collectively, the report says, such NGOs drag down India’s GDP growth by 2-3% annually. The authors do not offer the mathematics behind this claim.

Greenpeace gets a section to itself: 12 bullet points under the heading “Anti-coal activism”, a catalogue of activities that aims for a bare, ominous tone but winds up including observations so plain that they could have been drawn from Greenpeace’s own annual reports. (“In April 2013, Greenpeace supported and screened a documentary film, Coal Curse, directed by Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, on the harmful consequences of coal mining in Singrauli region.”) The IB accuses Greenpeace of coordinating protests against coal mines and power plants. Its funds finance studies on health and pollution, and pay for activists to travel to conferences. Its headquarters “regularly receive foreign experts. Recently, a group of cyber security experts upgraded its communication systems and installed sophisticated and encrypted software in its servers and computers.” In this manner, the report first presents a small batch of facts and then quickly links them, through pure elision of evidence, to destructive intent. These NGOs, the IB believes, do not just happen to have objectives that conflict with the government’s plans for development; rather, at the behest of foreign donors, they exert every sinew to slow the velocity of India’s economy.

The IB report was leaked the month after Modi was sworn in, having soundly defeated the Congress party. Jairam Ramesh, the Congress environment minister from 2009 to 2011, said he didn’t know his government had commissioned the report, “but I’m not surprised.” Some of his colleagues were deeply suspicious of NGOs, he said. In 2012 and 2013, the Congress government led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had forbidden nearly 5,000 NGOs from receiving foreign funds, around the time that protests were mounting over a nuclear power project in Tamil Nadu. Between his government and Modi’s, Ramesh said, there was a strain of continuity, a constituency devoted to economic growth at all costs. It was almost as if the state felt a duty, then but even more now, to bear down with force upon any obstacle perceived to be seriously impeding its plans for economic progress.

Ramesh himself had turned from an agnostic on environmental issues into a believer. He first told me that his experience with Greenpeace “was a disaster”. Its campaigns are aggressive and given to hyperbole, he said: “Too high-decibel, too vocal. Greenpeace’s philosophy is that you cannot work with governments, you have to confront governments. That’s a debatable philosophy.” But as we spoke, he softened, saying that he had fine relations with its executives and that Greenpeace was “a necessary nuisance”.

For nurturing these views, Ramesh came to be seen as “anti-growth” within his own government. Other ministers squabbled with him: “I was called a jholawala minister.” But this was healthy, he said. “We had different viewpoints, but ultimately the NGOs had access to us. You have to learn to deal with conflict democratically. Now that access to government has stopped, and [NGOs] are seen as an active roadblock to development. The environment ministry is closed.”

Aich told me, similarly, that Modi’s government offered no fronts for engagement at all. A short man with slowly silvering hair, Aich talks in a fast staccato, his voice getting higher as he approaches the end of each sentence. When I met him, he had been with Greenpeace for 11 years, seven of those as executive director. In that time, he said, he has never encountered such a tight-lipped, peremptory administration. Last June, after the IB report was leaked, Greenpeace India received some money from its parent in Amsterdam, but was told by its bank that the funds could not be released without the home ministry’s approval. The government had given Aich no advance intimation about blocking this funding channel; when he wrote to the ministry, he was rebuffed with silence. All told, over the year, “I’ve written umpteen letters to the ministry. At least 15 or 20 letters, maybe more. There’s been no response. Nothing at all.”

Any communication Greenpeace has received has been in the nature of an order or a notice. The first arrived in September 2014, just as the high court in Delhi began hearing Greenpeace’s petition to access its stopped funds, with the news that a home ministry team would inspect Greenpeace’s books in its office in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. Over four days, three officials trawled through ledgers and receipts; it appeared to Binu Jacob, who guided them through a decade’s worth of documents, that they were conducting not so much an exercise in accounting as in Talmudic interpretation.

A boy takes a bath under a tap near a polluted water channel in Kolkata. Photograph: Rupak de Chowdhuri/Reuters

“They told us as much: ‘See, this is the rule book, and we interpret it, and this is what we interpret,’” Jacob said. For instance, citing one rule that allows an NGO to use foreign funds for campaign work but not for more than 50% of administrative costs, the officials argued that air tickets were administrative costs. So was the consultancy fee for a soil analysis expert. “They were defining core campaigning so narrowly. I argued: ‘How would somebody go do a campaign if he can’t get to the location?’”

Another day, they wondered why a staffer received 100,000 rupees (£1,011) as a monthly salary. “They said: ‘Isn’t that too much for an NGO?’”

Not really, Jacob replied. After all, marketing professionals selling toothpaste earn 500,000 rupees a month, so why should somebody doing research work not earn 100,000?

“They said: ‘Binu, these arguments are not valid. We feel, for an NGO, this is too much.’ And they noted it,” Jacob said. He shook his head slowly, almost in marvel. “It was nit-picking.”

Every day, you find people crying in the office, saying they’re just too stressed and they can’t take it any more Priya Pillai

The report of this inspection, issued after two months, bristles with trivialities. Greenpeace largely works out of its Bangalore premises, even though its registered office is in Chennai; this was interpreted as a violation of an arcane rule requiring NGOs to inform the government of changes in headquarters. Two reimbursements of an employee’s accommodation expenses – for 10,036 and 12,549 rupees – were seen as fraudulent because both bills showed the same dates of stay. Aich’s salary was judged to be exorbitant. Some observations were minor infringements of India’s Foreign Contributions Regulation Act (FCRA), whose strictures are so myriad and so comprehensive in their vagueness that they can effect death by bureaucratic strangulation.

Jacob helped draft a response, explaining and rebutting where he could. Given the minor scale of the FCRA infringements, Greenpeace expected only raps on its knuckles or, at worst, a levy of small fines. Then, for a while, Priya Pillai’s run-in with the Delhi airport authorities consumed everyone’s attention. When the government responded, on 9 April, it was with a four-page order that took no note of Greenpeace’s clarifications, and ordered a freeze on all of its bank accounts.

The timings of these actions, Jacob observed, have been tidy and relentless, one following the other like deft clockwork. The September inspection occurred soon after a court began to consider the first interruption of Greenpeace’s foreign funding. The April notice blocking Greenpeace’s domestic and foreign-currency bank accounts was issued after another court verdict ruled in favour of Pillai in the matter of her detention. In late May, the Delhi high court unblocked Greenpeace’s domestic funds; the next day, officials from the state of Tamil Nadu, where Greenpeace is registered, announced another audit of its books. That report claimed to have identified a string of financial irregularities – one per year between 2005 and 2012 – and threatened to cancel Greenpeace’s registration altogether. Yet again, Greenpeace approached the court, arguing that its accounts were woefully misread, and that there was no “application of mind” in the officials’ examination.

Greenpeace’s well-publicised troubles have made Jacob’s job difficult. Its sympathisers have stuck with them, and even given more, but some potential new donors have dithered. “There was this guy I met, with an IT background, just back after his US stint. He had a lot of rich friends and sounded enthusiastic.” Jacob thought he might give at least 200,000 rupees. Then the donor wondered if supporting an NGO so transparently unpopular with the government was a wise move. “He backed out.”

Similarly, when Jacob’s team tried opening a new bank account in May, at least four banks dodged their business. “Nobody’s saying: ‘Don’t open an account for Greenpeace.’ No bank would say: ‘I won’t open an account for you.’ But somebody would say off the record: ‘I’m telling you, I don’t think it’s going to happen,’” Jacob said. One bank indicated it would have to seek the home ministry’s permission. “They’re scared.” Finally, Greenpeace persuaded a small bank, with just one branch, to accept its money. “They don’t even have online banking. It’s like, you know, your grandfather’s bank.”

Amid all this struggle, Greenpeace went through an internal convulsion. In February, a former staffer alleged in a Facebook post that she had been raped by a colleague and sexually harassed several times during her stint with Greenpeace. The organisation, she said, failed to deal with her complaints of harassment, so she had never filed a formal charge of rape. Aich apologised, admitted to mistakes and promised to make amends, but the pressure mounted until he resigned in June.

This fresh tribulation, in tandem with Greenpeace’s ongoing distress, fried everyone’s nerves, Pillai told me the week before Aich quit. We were in Greenpeace’s Delhi office, where she is based. “I haven’t slept for three days. Sometimes I’m emotional, sometimes I’m rational. It’s really stressful. Every day, you find two or three people crying in the office, saying they’re just too stressed, and that they can’t take this any more.”

Among the most ambiguous of the rules in India’s Foreign Contributions Regulations Act is one that prevents any foreign-funded NGO from comporting itself as an “organisation of a political nature”. Political parties fall within this classification, but so do organisations thought to be propagating an ideology or conducting “political activities”. In theory, there is little manoeuvring room within this rule for NGOs in a country where the state is a huge, powerful presence in every station between birth and death. To propose to change a life for the better is to posit that the government has failed. The personal is political everywhere, but nowhere more than in India.

Greenpeace activists protesting in Delhi in 2012. Photograph: Altaf Qadri/AP

I asked Pillai if she thought Greenpeace’s activities were political. “Every issue on this earth is political,” she said. “Women’s rights is a political issue. Child rights is a political issue. Energy policy in this country is a hugely political issue. But we don’t get engaged in mainstream politics, party politics.”

For months, I tried to approach some of the arms of the government, wanting to understand what they viewed as legitimate and illegitimate NGO activity. Soon after Modi’s election, his administration became known for being thoroughly watertight, letting no information leak and keeping reporters at bay. But upon sustained exertion, the boards started to give. On the other hand, Essar and Hindalco, the companies whose mining plans in Mahan had been disrupted by Greenpeace, proved more taciturn. An Essar representative told me that his company would not participate in this story; no one from Hindalco responded.

Sudhanshu Trivedi, a BJP spokesperson, met me in a five-star hotel, in a hushed bar with the sort of tinkling music that sounds as if it is made by flipping coins into glassware. Trivedi is a composed man with heavy-lidded eyes and an unexcitable manner of speech. He insisted, with as much emphasis as his languor would allow, that NGOs were free to do whatever work they chose, as long as they complied with the law. The government, he said, had only deregistered NGOs that had not filed their tax returns in years.

Greenpeace was a different matter: “They were selectively targeting those projects that were of great national importance for industrial growth and development. It’s a very thin line between creating environmental awareness and creating social unrest.” The government was also concerned that the foreign money flowing in to Greenpeace was being misused or improperly accounted. He was unclear on the technicalities, but he was confident that Greenpeace’s dubious finances were the source of its trouble. When I noted that the government had not been able to gather enough evidence to suspend Greenpeace outright, he shrugged and changed the subject.

I asked Trivedi about Pillai. Why was she stopped from going to London? “Because she had already visited twice,” he said, as if he was a nanny whose ward pined for the candy shop. “This was the third visit.”

I found out later that this was correct; Pillai had visited the UK twice when she had been working for Oxfam. “But she can visit any number of times,” I said. “It’s a free country.”

“That’s OK. But you are going to meet British MPs, your objective is not clear, you are unable to comply with the clarifications which were asked of you, and again you want to go. So some suspicion arises.”

In fact, as I learned, the government did not contact Pillai at all before her trip, whether to seek clarifications or to tell her she could not travel. A home ministry official, who asked not to be named, insisted that this had been the government’s only mistake. The decision to stop Pillai’s trip was taken three days before her scheduled departure: “We couldn’t locate her earlier,” he said. “And it was the weekend. So we could only do it at the airport.”

Apart from that, the official argued, the government’s logic was perfectly lucid. “We have our own system of inputs. We received some inputs that she’d made some statements on overseas trips.” The intent of these statements, he said, was “to denigrate our country globally. So if your activities, whether inside the country or outside, are found to be incompatible with the government’s view, it can take action.” He tried, very sincerely, to persuade me of the strength of this argument. Greenpeace, as an international NGO, was a guest in India, he said. “A guest should know his limitations.”

Within government circles, I frequently heard the view that Greenpeace’s motives are malign. Modi came to power on a din of promises about industrial growth and economic progress; to raise concerns that differ with these particular visions of growth and progress is to run the risk of being regarded as anti-national. “In Mahan, they tried to stop a project after it was already commissioned,” an environment ministry official told me. “That suggests an agenda, that they are anti-development.” Last year, the supreme court cancelled a host of coal mining licences – including the one for Mahan – because of corruption in the auction process. When Modi’s government set up a new auction in March, it left Mahan out, pulling its forests back under protection. I pointed this out, suggesting that Greenpeace had been justified in opposing the licence. “Yes,” the official said, “but Mahan can always be revived. India deserves its development. And there’s an agenda to stop it.” Here it was again, the reflexive invocation of malevolence. To encounter it on social media, that amplifier of acrimony, was one thing; to run into it in a serious conversation with a government official, and to think that it informed policy, felt far more troubling.

One evening, I met Prakash Javadekar, India’s environment minister, in his office, interrupting him in the middle of a snack of diced papaya. For activists, Javadekar’s tenure has been distressing. The government has peeled away several safeguards that protect forests and people who live around them, lifted a moratorium on new industries in eight areas designated as “critically polluted,” and reconfigured regulatory authorities to shrink the role of independent voices. More than once, I heard the remark that Javadekar measures his ministry’s value by how speedily it approves new projects and not how effectively it protects the environment.

This was the case in our conversation. Javadekar told me that he had taken care of pendency – the numerous cases awaiting clearances – and moved many procedures online. Only secondly, he said, “We’ve taken more care for nature than the earlier regime.” He counted off items on his fingers: the introduction of an air pollution monitoring system, a revision of emission norms and a bill to plant trees in degraded forest areas.

I asked him how NGOs such as Greenpeace fit into his plans for environmental management. “There are thousands of NGOs with whom we partner,” he said. “Many schools, many colleges. Yesterday, I was in the district of Chitrakoot, and more than 2,000 youths from four NGOs participated in a river-cleaning scheme.” Greenpeace had fallen afoul only of the home ministry: “As far as we’re concerned, we’re talking to everybody. There’s no issue.”

Did Greenpeace do any good work in India?

“I don’t know,” Javadekar replied.

“But your ministry must have tracked the work they do.”

“We track thousands of NGOs that do field work,” he said. When I asked if Greenpeace was one of them, he said: “I don’t know. We must have given … we have taken their help. I take criticism also. I’m always open.”

I persisted. “Don’t you think an NGO like Greenpeace brings any benefit to your field?”

“I really don’t know about Greenpeace,” Javadekar said, his face impassive.

“But they’re such a big player in your field.”

“No, but there are thousands of NGOs, baba.” His ministry, he said, focuses on working with those that are active on the ground.

“And not so much with Greenpeace?”

“No, I’ve not said anything.”

Javadekar became animated again when I inquired if he had a tough job. He did, he said, although his government believed that economic progress and environmental protection could coexist. He raised a point that India has made frequently and successfully at international forums: that poorer countries must be allowed to depend on fossil fuels to lift people out of poverty. “The principle of equity says that every citizen of mine deserves development – his or her carbon space. We have 17% of the world’s population, and 17% of the world’s cattle, but only 2.5% of the world’s land mass. So asking the west to vacate carbon space is a real challenge.”

Greenpeace has never been popular with governments; in fact, its activists strain to be unpopular, stopping aircraft from taking off, busting into power stations, or breaking the law in other ways. In 2013, Russia arrested 30 Greenpeace activists in the Arctic for trying to board a Gazprom oilrig. Last year, Greenpeace ran into criticism for damaging the Nazca Lines, an ancient set of etchings in the Peruvian desert, during an ill-judged protest. In Australia, Greenpeace risks losing its status as a tax-deductible society, as it has done in Canada and New Zealand. The rationale behind these disqualifications is similar to the Indian government’s grouses with Greenpeace. A New Zealand judge, in 2011, found that Greenpeace’s “political activities … cannot be regarded as ‘merely ancillary’ to Greenpeace’s charitable purposes”. The same year, Stephen Harper, Canada’s prime minister, worried that “significant American interests” were pouring money into environmental groups to stop projects including an oil pipeline.

In all likelihood, Greenpeace – and other campaigning groups – will face these situations increasingly in the coming years. As in India at the moment, the pressures upon governments to ramp up economic growth and to drain every ounce of extractable resource out of the earth are immense. Simultaneously, the environment edges closer to peril. For anyone who has breathed the air of Delhi or Mumbai, or witnessed the alarming degradation of the country’s water bodies, or understood how Indian governments and crony capitalists connive to bypass environmental laws, the need for NGOs seems obvious, even urgent. Activists fire themselves up to be bolder and louder. Collisions with the state are inevitable.

In dealing with Greenpeace, though, the Indian government has been clumsy and heavy-handed, achieving nothing except a display of intolerance for dissent. To harp upon the dangers of Greenpeace’s foreign funding, for instance, seems trivial: only 60m rupees (£606,000) out of its rough annual budget of 260m rupees (£4.75m) comes from overseas. In comparison, Essar – whose leaked emails have shown a propensity to bestow favours upon politicians – had planned to invest roughly 40bn rupees (£404m) in two coal-fired power plants in Mahan.

All the heat and noise of Modi’s actions against Greenpeace has drowned out debates about growth in India

But perhaps the heaviness of hand is deliberate, one person in Delhi’s NGO community suggested. (“You can’t quote me,” he cautioned. “We get foreign funding too.”) The government is signalling to industry and “to a core of voters that indulges in conspiratorial nationalism: ‘See how we’ve taken on these purveyors of false ideologies?’” he said. These “false ideologies” could find their champions in any number of people and groups the government regards as its opponents: ardent environmentalists, rival politicians, media houses, non-profits, social media warriors, critics of Hindu nationalism. In an instance from last week, the government issued notices to three television channels, threatening to kick them off air for broadcasting interviews that had criticised the execution of a convicted terrorist; the interviews, the notices rumbled, “cast aspersions on the integrity” of the judiciary. The result of harassment of this type, this person said, “is that people fear this government more”.

Meanwhile, all the heat and noise of the government’s actions against Greenpeace has drowned out the truly consequential debates about growth and environmental protection in India. Sejal Worah, the programme director of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in India, said that Greenpeace is effective at pulling issues into public attention, but that it does not acknowledge the complications of what people want. “When I talk to people in villages about conservation, there’s a real pushback from people on the ground, who’re basically saying: ‘We want development. At this point in time, we see the environment and forests and forest conservation and all that stuff as simply holding us back from developing,’” Worah said. “There’s an impatience, and it’s scary, this groundswell of people who’re saying: ‘You’re sitting in your air-conditioned room, and you’re telling us we can’t have a road to our village because of a few hundred trees being cut.’”

Given this, Worah said, an obdurate stance against coal, for instance, is not practical. “Greenpeace is usually black or white.” The WWF, on the other hand, spent more than a year internally debating its global position on coal. “We go through this whole process of consultations, understanding what each country’s context is, and then we come up with a complicated three-pager which says: ‘This is the thing, we don’t like coal, but for developing countries, this is the phase-out period’, and so on. What we don’t have, as a result, is a Greenpeace-type, jump-out-there statement saying: ‘No coal.’”

The intransigence of its positions can spark some doubt about how Greenpeace India makes decisions. This doubt, said Ambuj Sagar, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, has nothing to do with the paranoid perception of some vast global plan to derail India’s economy. Rather, Sagar, who studies environmental policy issues, worries that Greenpeace International formulates a plain, one-size-fits-all agenda, without considering the needs of different countries. During a conference in Bali in 2007, he recalled by way of example, Greenpeace India released a report titled Hiding Behind the Poor, claiming India’s per-capita emissions figures masked the voraciousness with which rich Indians consume carbon.

A Greenpeace protest against Essar Energy

in Mumbai last year. Photograph: Divyakant Solanki/EPA/Corbis

“I had a flaming row with them, sitting in a bar,” Sagar said. The title applied perfectly, he argued – but only if the report dealt with how wealthy western countries hid behind poorer developing ones. “Most rich Indians emit like typical middle-class Americans, at most. They don’t have three cars or centralised heating.” After the shouting match, one Greenpeace staffer came up to Sagar and admitted that the idea for the report had come from Greenpeace International. “So these issues are really complex, and I often find them misrepresented,” Sagar said. “I don’t want to put coal on a pedestal. It’s a shitty and horrible energy resource. I’d like us to have no coal if possible. But we don’t have anything else.”

In early July, I returned to Bangalore to find the Greenpeace building draped with two vertical banners, worn like bright yellow braces. One read: “DEMOCRACY”, the other “FREE SPEECH”. I stood looking at them, talking to a staffer. “They were hung by our action team, which includes a few women,” she said. “So a crowd collected when that was happening, because they were fascinated to see these women doing this. But they’ve been trained to scale buildings.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Of course,” she said, laughing. She referred to a famous Greenpeace stunt from January 2014, in which 12 activists in tiger costumes draped a banner reading “We Kill Forests” upon the 180-foot glass facade of Essar’s headquarters in Mumbai. “How else would we scale an Essar building?”

In the ground-floor conference room, I met Vinuta Gopal and her daughter, who is not yet two. Gopal, who has been with Greenpeace since it began working in India in 2001, had switched her contract to a consultancy after the birth of her daughter, to gain a more flexible schedule. But Aich had resigned the previous week, so Gopal returned full-time as one of two interim directors. Her daughter now came to the office every day; during our conversation, she applied herself diligently to a Kit-Kat and then, replete, stretched out on her mother’s lap for a nap.

Having heard so many people criticise Greenpeace for its adamant stances, I asked Gopal if, on an issue such as coal, her organisation had misjudged its communications. In fact, she replied, the bluntness was part of the strategy. “Our position is that India needs to transition away from coal, not that India needs to stop using coal,” she said. “Greenpeace isn’t saying: ‘Shut down all your coal plants.’ That’s unreasonable. But what people get from us is our banners and our photographs. A banner will say ‘Forests Not Coal’, so it seems the message is India should protect all its forests and keep all its coal in the ground.”

Was it not a burden for Greenpeace to be constantly judged by its stark messaging and its confrontational activism?

Gopal thought about this. “Greenpeace certainly has to reinvent itself,” she said, slowly. “It’s something we’re working on across the globe. Merely hanging off a building or a power plant isn’t going to make a difference. It has to be arguments that people believe in, investigations, exposés. Ultimately, it’s going to be the power of the people that brings about change, not a small group saying: ‘This is the way things should be.’” But the messaging “isn’t something you dismiss. Otherwise, why would we be in the position we’re in, facing a crackdown?”

The weeks leading up to my meeting with Gopal had been the hardest Greenpeace India had ever faced. The storm over the sexual harassment charges had blown high; Aich had quit; Greenpeace’s registration was newly imperilled. Morale had plummeted. In all likelihood, the shakedown of Greenpeace, and of other civil society groups, will continue. It is in the character of this government to persecute its adversaries, and the convolutions of the law provide many ways for the state to install difficulties in their paths. Keeping up both the appetite and the funds to continue fighting was “the real challenge”, Gopal said. “But now we’re no longer shocked by anything that happens to us. We’ve gotten used to expecting trouble.”

Samanth Subramanian is the India correspondent for The National and the author of This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War



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