NEW DELHI, 27 November 2007 — Controversial Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen seems to have no place to go to. Threatened by activists, Taslima has become a victim of political ping-pong in India, bundled from one city to another in a controversy critics say has shamed the secular state.
Speaking to a Bengali TV channel, Taslima said: “Bangladesh has closed its doors on me. Now if West Bengal also closes its doors, I will be nowhere. I will die without Kolkata. I am a Bengali after all.”
The political party that has come out in Taslima’s support is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). “The government has been silent on Taslima case which deserves criticism. She has not been provided security,” senior BJP leader V.K. Malhotra said.
In the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of Parliament, eminent jurist Ram Jethmalani said the way Taslima was being made to run for her life was “shameful and disgraceful.” He pressed New Delhi to provide security to the Bengali writer.
The demand came with Taslima in hiding in the Indian capital after being escorted out of Kolkata and then Jaipur in the north following protests by thousands of Muslims demanding her expulsion.
Jethmalani said Nasreen, who fled Bangladesh in 1994, must be allowed to live in security in India.
“She must be given complete security and the right to live in India,” the MP said amid reports the government was planning to shift her to a fortified guest house in Noida, an industrial suburb of New Delhi.
“Taslima should be treated as a political refugee in India with a right to live with dignity and security and she is also entitled to all rights which have been given to the Tibetan refugees,” the BJP said in a resolution.
Meanwhile, the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), which heads the West Bengal government, categorically denied yesterday that the state government had anything to do with Taslima’s movement from the state to Jaipur and then to Delhi.
“Let me clarify that the state government had nothing to do with sudden movement of the author from Kolkata to Jaipur. Please read the news stories in some of the leading newspapers where detailed accounts of her departure are given. Her flight was booked, her hotel was booked and she flew to Jaipur. As far as the claims of the Rajasthan government that it had not been consulted, it would be looked into by the government of West Bengal,” senior CPI-M leader Sitarram Yechury told a press conference.
Disagreeing with former Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir Farooq Abdullah that Taslima should not be allowed to write while she is in India on a temporary visa, Yechury said: “I personally feel that no restrictions should be placed on her writings. As far as she is concerned, the union government has to take a decision where she is best secured. She had been living in West Bengal for the last three years. So why will we tell her to move out now?”
On a question about Taslima’s desire to return to Kolkata, Yechury said it was for the union government to take a decision on this first, without which state government’s stand has little relevance.
