Exiled Bangladesh writer Taslima Nasreen has slammed Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee for being harsher to her than the erstwhile left Front Government.
The rebel Bangla writer who was currently in an undisclosed location in Delhi said, “I had expected that the situation in West Bengal will change after Mamata came to power. But I was wrong as I found her harsher than the earlier left Front Government.”
Nasreen was thrown out of Kolkata following a mass protest from a section of the radical Mullah community in 2007. In fact the Army had to be called out to thwart any kind of communal tension even as hundreds of protesters led amongst others by Idris Ali currently a Trinamool Congress MP descended on the streets demanding the writer’s ouster from Bengal.
Curiously, the same group of people who led anti-Taslima protests in Kolkata were seen backing Mamata Banerjee in her Nandigram and Rizwanur Rehman movements the same year.
Nasreen who has been living under life threat said the politicians were no different from each other when it came to vote bank politics.
She said she was a “victim of vote bank politics” adding “politicians are all on the same platform when it comes down to me. I think it is because they think that if they can satisfy the Muslim fundamentalists they will get votes.”
Attacking Mamata for playing “vote bank politics” Nasreen complained “she (Banerjee) has not allowed my book Nirbasan to be published. Also she has stopped the broadcast of a TV serial scripted by me after Muslim fundamentalists objected to it. She is not allowing me to enter the State (Bengal). This is a dangerous opposition.”
Nasreen claims to have written to the Bengal Chief Minister “but I did not get any response from her,” She also wrote a “positive” article on Mamata yet that “did not help my cause as nothing changed Mamata.”
The activist-writer who has supported the cause of Uniform Civil Code in India which she believes will end oppression of Muslim women said she would not write to the Chief Minister again. “I do not think she will consider my request. I feel very hopeless because I expected her to be positive” but “she has a similar vision like that of the left leaders.”
Nasreen who wrote the famous novels like lajja (Shame), Nasto Meyer Nasto Gaddo (Wasted Prose of Wasted Girl), Meyebela, My Bengali Girlhood, Shodh, The Game in Reverse, All About Women and won honours like Sakharov Prize, Simon de Beauvoir Prize, UNESCO-Madanjeet Singh Prize and Anand Purashkar, was driven out of Bangladesh in 1994. She currently has a Swedish Passport.