Every time that man came to a college hostel in Kottayam with his bunch of vegetables, he ogled at the girls. Priya Pillai and her friends at the hostel found it uncomfortable.
One day, they came to know that he abused his own daughter physically. They went straight to the collector, the first administrative official Priya met. He was a sensitive officer and she formed her first impression about bureaucrats: ‘They are nice human beings’. But that was only the beginning, and opinions changed in the years she met and fought with a lot of them, for human rights.
Priya has always found it tough to be quiet when she found anything unjust. She acted, she reacted. She did so even back in college in Kerala, long before the Greenpeace days, long before that offloading from a London flight which brought her name to news headlines for days.
Modest Priya will not tell you that. She is one of those hardcore activists who believe the cause you fight for is more important than yourself. But then the offloading incident made her the face of Greenpeace in India for the past few months.
She was going to brief British MPs about the forest dwelling communities who would be affected by a proposed coal-mining project by a London-based company. Following orders of the government of India, immigration officials stamped her passport with ‘OFFLOAD’ and banned her from leaving the country. The ban had been lifted last week but the fight continues. “This government uses bans to rule the country, it wants to ban Perumal Murugan’s book, beef... there is a need to fight this system from a capital takeover,” Priya says in fluent Malayalam.
She is a proper Malayali, she says, with roots in Alappuzha, though she was raised in Bengal. But for college, she came first to the M.G. University in Kottayam, and then had a stint at the Law College in Thiruvananthapuram. “Unfortunately I couldn’t complete that.” Marriage brought her a connection to Thrissur, where her freelance journalist husband hails from. His work took them both to Bhopal, where Priya began her activist days, going deep into the villages to work with the tribal people. At first it was the right to food campaign with ActionAid. Then there was a two-year fight for women’s rights.
“These are the issues that touched me the most, among all that I fought for. Caste-based violence, where women born into a particular caste are forced into flesh trade...I don’t judge women in prostitution but here it is not a choice. Unlike many other places, the birth of a girl is celebrated in these parts because tomorrow she will be sent to sex trade and she’ll bring money to the family. Brothers and fathers become pimps.”
Then came Greenpeace, and this May 18 marked the fifth anniversary of her joining. “But there was no time to remember all that in the middle of this,” she says. Five years of fighting for environmental issues and tribal rights and now she has been given the tag of an anti-national, a number of trolls abusing her on the Internet.
“In Mahan — one of the oldest sal forests of Asia — in Madhya Pradesh, the companies Essar and Hindalco wanted to have the coalmine that would affect the lives of people in 54 tribal villages. I was fighting against that and making it an on-ground fight, organising communities. This attracted anger from the government because we (Greenpeace) were standing in the way of a major investment. That’s why I was offloaded, that’s why I am labelled anti-national.” That London trip is not needed anymore, the coal mine has been de-allocated. But there is a lot to be done here, with foreign funds to Greenpeace still frozen, with a system that has been constantly coming down upon them. And Priya, as always, cannot be quiet.
