Sideways News

The writer has been exiled following a series of fatwas

46 year-old Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin makes a point when her email profile qualifier reads, "Living everywhere."
 
It's ironic, though, that while she has access to everywhere else in the world, Bangladesh and India - her birthplace and home-in-exile respectively - refuse to even acknowledge her presence. For New Delhi, she is a "security risk" while in Dhaka, she has been persona non-grata for the last 15 years.

Apart from her writings which Islamic fundamentalists said were insults to the Holy Koran, she also fell foul of the Indian government when her presence in the eastern provincial city of Kolkata in November 2007 led to widespread riots, fuelled by fanatics.

Subsequently, her novel, Dwikhandito (Split Into Two) was banned by the provincial government of West Bengal, where she had rented a house and set up home, with her cat for company.

Pressure from religious groups
The reason, as Nasrin says in an interview from New York, is the same in both countries. "It is a political decision," she says. "I have a residency permit in India, while Bangladesh is my homeland. Both these countries have thrown me out under pressure from fundamentalist Islamic groups. I am just an ordinary writer. I am powerless to put pressure on any government to allow me to stay wherever I feel like."
 
In 1993 and 1994, Nasrin was put under three death threats - fatwas - by Islamic fundamentalist groups, which said she had insulted the Holy Koran in her writings.
 
"Millions of Islamic fundamentalists were out on the streets asking the government to hang me publicly, " she recounts. A doctor by profession, Nasrin had to go into hiding after the government, "instead of protecting me, issued an arrest warrant...after two months, I was put on a plane and showed the door," she says.

Finding a home
Sweden offered her citizenship while she hopped in and out of India. She stayed in Kolkata before riots broke out in November 2007, with fundamentalist groups demanding that she be deported or "hanged in public."
 

The story is, in retrospect, a thriller to the last act. After staying under unofficial house arrest for four months, Nasrin was "whisked away in the dead of night" to Rajasthan, a western province of India, brought to Delhi after "exactly seven hours," then bundled into a plane bound overseas.
 
During her stay, five fatwas were issued against her in India. In August 2007, during a seminar in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, she was attacked by a violent group and escaped through "sheer presence of mind" by the backdoor of the hall.
 
"Since then, I have come to India thrice, pleaded with people at all levels, but nobody has even taken a single step to ensure that I could return and live in India," she said.

Seeking refuge - in her birthplace
In the meantime, says Nasrin, she wrote to the Bangladesh Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina Wazed, who "has not bothered to reply… She does not care. She thinks she can choose who should live in Bangladesh."
 
"But I will not apologise for whatever I have written about the fundamentalists. I am not like Salman Rushdie who said sorry and continued to live in the West. I want to return to my homeland or India. And I am willing to risk my life for that and continue my legitimate fight till the day I die."
 
"I have pleaded with almost all the Bangladesh embassies in the western world to allow me to return. Even when my parents were on their deathbed, I requested them to allow me to visit them for only a week. Even that was not allowed. I have asked why my Bangladesh passport has not been renewed but I have not yet got an answer. Each and every government has illegally denied me my freedom to live in my homeland or India just to please the whims of fundamentalists", Nasrin said.

Unhappy with the West
Nasrin, unlike many from the Indian sub-continent, hates to live in the West, though she shuttles from one capital to another with human rights groups to "raise awareness against fundamentalism and gender prejudice."
 
Says Nasrin, "I hate to live in the West though I am treated as a celebrity writer. I have met PMs and the men on the streets… and I have realised that human suffering is same everywhere. But it is not emotionally or economically feasible for me to live in the West. I cannot relate to the West. I die a hundred deaths daily, but I am fated to live the life of an alien in a foreign land, I guess," she said.
 
Though she is slated to visit India this month, she is not optimistic. "I have no appoinments with anybody. I do not know anyone in power. But I hope they allow me to live in Delhi, at least, if not in Kolkata."

The elevation of her profile has led to many positive actions. Nasrin made people in the West sit up and take notice of the fact that fundamentalists were going about scot-free after asking for a woman's head and forcing two governments to their knees.

She has been asked to the UN, and is currently involved with many human rights organisations, including The Non-Religion Humanist Platform, formed in Kolkata in 2006. This, for a woman from Bangladesh, is viewed as very positive profile-raising work in the West - and her media presence is testament to this. She had also formed a secular organsiation of Muslim progressives in Kolkata, India, and was doing humanitarian work when the fundamentalists struck in November 2007.

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