On Wednesday, Greenpeace India made an announcement which they hoped to be for the betterment of the organization. Despite ongoing legal battles, the group appointed environmentalist Ravi Chellam as the new director. Chellam, who has worked with wildlife organizations and with the United Nations Development Programme, seemed to be qualified for the position, as Greenpeace India continues to face legalities with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Despite only making the announcement now, Chellam had already assumed the Executive Director role earlier this month.
Before Chellam, the role belonged to Samit Aich, who resigned last June. Along with him, Programme Director Divya Raghunandan resigned from his post as they both handled sexual harassment charges and a rape allegation. Neither of the two, however, were directly implicated on any of the cases.
Greenpeace has been in India for the last 15 years. Despite this amount of time in the country, the group has been engaged in legal issues with the Modi-led government for its local operations and funding. The group, however, has successfully been able to defend itself ever since. The most recent case the group faced was when they were given a government order to cancel their license in India. The Madras High Court halted this in November and allowed to group to continue with their operations. Prior to this, the foreign funding license of the group was suspended by New Delhi and its domestic bank accounts were frozen for alleged rule violations. Thankfully, it did not take the group too long to remove these legal blockages with the aid of those who supported their campaigns.
According to Greenpeace, all these legal issues they are facing is brought about by their criticism of the Indian government. In the past few years, Greenpeace has criticized the government for causing environmental degradation through its nuclear projects, deforestation, and excessive use of coal power. Now that Chellam is leading the group, they are confident that they will arise from the legal issues placed on them by the government.
