But a home in Kolkata remains a distant dream
By renewing exiled Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen's visa for another year, the BJP-led NDA regime at the Centre has brought to an end last month's unsavoury controversy on this issue. Importantly, it has sent out a clear signal that the new Government will not capitulate before fundamentalists and will ensure that this country always has a place for persecuted individuals like Ms Nasreen. The acclaimed author, now a Swedish citizen, has lived continuously in India since 2004. She has also expressed her desire to settle permanently in this country. However, the Union Government's decision in late July to give her only a two-month temporary visa had evoked a strong response not only from the author, who even met Union Minister for Home Affairs Rajnath Singh to present her case, but also from the country's intellectual elite. Many had assumed that the move was designed to soften the new Government's supposedly ‘Hindu hardline' image, by pandering to Muslim extremists who remain staunchly opposed to Ms Nasreen's work. Critics had claimed that after having spent a decade criticising the UPA regime for its pseudo-secular policies, the NDA Government was walking down the same path of minority appeasement for the sake of vote-bank politics. They have now been proved wrong. The delay in renewing her visa was due to the verification process that the Home Ministry had to undertake. This also explains why Ms Nasreen was given a short-term visa, to tide over the interim period.
With the visa issue resolved, hopefully, self-proclaimed secularists, quick to denounce the NDA regime, will also spare a condemnation or two for the Government of West Bengal which still does not allow the author to travel or live in that State. In 2007, Ms Nasreen was driven out of West Bengal, supposedly one of the most liberal, tolerant and secular of Indian States given three decades of communist rule, after Muslim groups rallied against her book, Dwikhondito. The protests quickly spun out of control and the Army had to be called in to restore calm. Under pressure, the Government of Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee banished Ms Nasreen from the State. The author has lived primarily in the national capital since then. The incumbent Chief Minister of West Bengal, Ms Mamata Banerjee, who came to power in 2011 with a massive mandate, promising to be everything that the left Government could not be, however, stuck to her predecessor's policy in this case. This is not surprising given that her Trinamool Congress's minority appeasement tendencies are even stronger than those of the left Front. Unfortunately, in the process, the supposedly secular Government of West Bengal has put itself in the same boat as the reactionary Government of Bangladesh which exiled Ms Nasreen in 1994, after she wrote about the atrocities that Bangladeshi Hindus had to face in the aftermath of the demolition of the Babri mosque.