Russia halts move to ban sacred Hindu text

A Russian court Wednesday upheld a decision to permit the publication of a sacred Hindu text whose attempted ban sparked protests in India and threatened to strain Moscow's close ties with New Delhi. A regional court in the Siberian region of Tomsk said in a statement it had decided "to leave unchanged" a December lower court ruling stating that the "Bhagavad Gita" did not contain extremist material. Prosecutors had been trying to ban the text's translation for months because it contained a prologue by Swami Prabhupada -- founder of the Hare Krishna movement that has had repeated run-ins with the law in post-Soviet Russia. "This is a completely just, reasonable and -- most importantly -- legitimate decision," the movement's court representative Alexander Shakhov was quoted as saying by the Vesti news channel. Indian Ambassador Ajai Malhotra for his part said he hoped the issue would now be dropped by the Russian authorities once and for all. "I trust that this issue is now conclusively behind us," the ambassador said in a statement. But prosecutors left the door open to an appeal once the ruling is studied in detail. "An appeal to a higher court can now only be made by the region's prosecutor general," a local prosecutor's office representative told Russian news agencies. Prosecutors had asked for the ban in June after running a check on Hare Krishna's activities in the Siberian region. The Russian general prosecutor's office had also conduction national checks on the movement in 2004 and 2005. The case threatened to create an unexpected roadblock in the traditionally close relations between Moscow and New Delhi. Indian Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna described the prosecutors' attempted ban as the work of "ignorant and misdirected or motivated individuals" that attacked a text defining the "very soul of our great civilisation". Russia's foreign ministry had initially defended the ban by noting that it only referred to the disputed preface rather than the ancient text itself. National prosecutors then mounted a furious campaign to outlaw the text in Russia amid fears that the Hare Krishna might threaten the Russian Orthodox Church's dominant sway in the country's regions. The Russian prosecutor general's office released an assessment at the end of February concluding that the translation "had a very, very distant relation to the ancient text." But a group of prominent Russian scientists and the official human rights ombudsman this week called on President Dmitry Medvedev to ensure the protection of religious freedoms and make a special note of the case. A controversial 1997 law requires religious groups that had not been active in Russia for at least 15 years to register with the authorities and strictly limits foreign missionary work.