India fails to extend security to visiting Bangladesh feminist writer!

Taslima Nasrin's Return to India

MEHUL KAMDAR

RENOWNED BANGLADESH-BORN writer and humanist Dr Taslima Nasrin returned to India after being held under virtual house-imprisonment for several months prior to her departure from India in March this year. When she was unceremoniously bundled out of the country to Sweden, she had declared, I will come to India in July or August. Leaving India permanently means death to me. After coming, I will see whether I will be allowed to enter Kolkata or not. The reason for her return was very significant: her Indian visa was valid only until August 12th, and before she left, the Indian government had been loath to renew or extend it under pressure from its allies, some of the most fundamentalist Muslim organisations in India and the Communist Party of India (Marxist).

Photo: Taslima Nasrin attacked at Hydrabad, India during a presentation by Andra Pradesh MLA's Majlis Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen. "Presently the elected state representatives remains immune from law."

Dr Nasrin had, in fact, applied for Indian citizenship before she was deported to Sweden. This had been denied to her and the Communists and the Muslim organisations had been unambiguous in their demand that she be expelled from the country. The Communists had banned some of her writing in the state of West Bengal some years earlier and Muslim organisations had attacked Dr Nasrin in full view of the television cameras and the media at a public function in the state of Andhra Pradesh ruled by the Congress Party in what was clearly an attempt at killing her. How had the Indian government reacted at the time? It had allowed the government of Andhra Pradesh to file several cases, not against those who tried to brutalise Dr Nasrin, (this including legislators of a party that is a Congress ally much as the Communists were Congress allies at the time) but against Dr Nasrin herself on completely trumped up charges. There were clear reasons for this at the time. The Communists had been responsible for grabbing land owned by India's minority Muslim community at Nandigram and Singur in West Bengal, and for the subsequent brutal intimidation of those who had been dispossessed from land ownership by members of their party and by the West Bengal police, in a public display of thuggish behaviour. The Communists conveniently made peace with the Islamists in India by bartering Dr Nasrin's expulsion from the country (something that the Islamists had been demanding for some time) for their silence on the killing of Muslims and the thievery of their land.

Since then, the Communists had very nearly brought down the Indian Central government over the government's signing of a key nuclear treaty with the USA to the displeasure of the Chinese and of Indian leftists. In West Bengal itself, in local elections, the Communists had done rather badly for the first time in decades during which they had established a vice-like grip over the state. After being cautious allies for the better part of four years, the Congress and the Communists had suddenly become enemies in the run up to a General Election in 2009 which is likely to be hard-fought and which could go any way in India's fractured political scenario. The Congress had fallen back on an old ploy of playing one group against another by offering land to Hindus to worship at a temple in the predominantly Muslim state of Jammu and Kashmir hoping to get crucial Hindu votes because they were unsure of Muslim support in the coming elections. This is a ploy that ahs been used by the Congress in the past. The late Rajiv Gandhi's government reopened the Babri Masjid during the closing years of his term as Prime Minister to allow Hindu groups to place a Shivalinga there and allow worship when Muslim groups became furious with the government over the Indian Supreme Court's insistence that divorced Muslim women had a right to receive alimony from their ex-husbands in the Shah Bano's case. Not only did the Congress pass the so-called Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act of 1986 which effectively nullified the Supreme Court's judgement at the time, the party also tried to curry favour with Islamists by banning Salman Rushdie's book, The Satanic Verses well before any Muslim country banned it and Iran issued a fatwa on his head. This time, it has found another formerly Muslim author to play these games with in Dr Nasrin.

The deviousness of the Congress stand has been most interesting. Pranab Mukherjee, the Minister for External Affairs and the senior most Bengali politician in the Central government, has been talking out of both sides of his mouth in the past few days over Dr Nasrin's return. He has been reported in the Bangladeshi media as saying that he hoped that Dr Nasrin would not cause any trouble. In words that have been reported in the Bangladeshi media, he is supposed to have said, it is not possible for the Foreign Minister of a country to keep track of the country's guests. It is for them [the guests] to decide. We expect our guest not to do anything which (sic) is causing a problem to any of our citizen (sic) and there will no problem (sic) due to his or her stay in the country. To India's liberals and to the rest of the world, Mr Mukherjee spoke out of the opposite side of his mouth with various statements attributed to him by different sections of the media. India's Communist run newspaper The Hindu quoted him as saying, everyone is welcome to stay in the country provided they remain within their limits. To the Asian Age, a newspaper formerly run by a Congress Party pamphleteer and Rajiv Gandhi sycophant M J Akbar, he said, "It is our tradition that we give shelter to anyone who seeks it but we also expect our guest to refrain from doing or saying something which may create problems for our countrymen.” To the Tribune, a powerful newspaper in Western India, he is supposed to have commented that Dr Nasrin could live anywhere in India, but this was contradicted when the minister told the Asian Age that it was up to West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee (one of those directly responsible for the thuggish hounding of Dr Nasrin) whether, indeed, she could return to Kolkata.

It is clear that the Congress Party and the Indian government that it heads, are playing a cynical game using Dr Nasrin as a political football of sorts. Despite Mr Mukherjee's pompous assertions that Dr Nasrin could live anywhere she chose, she has been whisked away by Indian intelligence officials and held at some undisclosed location in virtual captivity. India cannot afford to look like the thuggish state that it is with the ratification of the nuclear agreement pending in the US Congress, where the majority Democratic Party is ambivalent about it. Democratic Party mouthpieces like The New York Times have slammed the agreement and openly campaigned for the USA to drop it. Any mention of the treatment meted out to a woman writer in the US media would evoke loud cries and possibly encourage anti treaty sentiment in a party and a media that is opposed to any form of fascist and misogynistic behaviour anywhere in the world. It is in this background that the two-faced attitude of the Indian government and its flip-flops over Dr Nasrin have to be judged. #

Mehul Kamdar is an Indian born columnist and former editor and presently residing in United States