CHENNAI: It’s been reported this week that Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin has been invited to return to Kolkata—albeit only for a poetry recital on August 1—two decades after she was driven from the city in the face of protests by Muslim organisations against her critique of Shariat laws.
She has been in exile from her native country since 1994 and has lived as a refugee alternately in India and some western countries. Being a Bengali speaker, she was put up in Kolkata for a while in the 2000s, until she became a hot potato for the then Left Front government and was hurriedly flown out to New Delhi when her autobiographical work ‘Dwikhandita’ triggered rioting in 2007.
Now with the Hindu nationalist BJP in power in West Bengal, her return has been announced with some enthusiasm, apparently to make a point to the minority community. Free rein to writers is always welcome and Nasrin has an artiste’s licence to present her views fearlessly anywhere. However, there is unmistakable hypocrisy in the BJP government in Kolkata green-lighting an invitation to the writer just weeks after its parent government in Delhi contrived to scuttle the release of a film on extrajudicial killings in Punjab in the 1990s and to stop the funding to the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), a reputed and autonomous research institution.
Seen in context, the overture to Nasrin is not a nod to freedom of expression but misuse of a writer as a tool to push a political agenda. The film in trouble, ‘Satluj’ starring Diljit Dosanjh, explores the life of an activist, Jaswant Singh Khalra, who investigated extrajudicial executions by the Punjab Police in the 1980s and 1990s. Its release was held up for four years as the Central Board of Film Certification put the producers through a rigmarole, demanding 127 cuts and subjecting it to multiple reviews.
When the filmmakers chose to bypass a cinema release altogether and placed the uncut movie on a streaming platform, which requires no censor certificate, it was abruptly pulled down within 48 hours based on a directive from the government citing IT Rules. Without invoking an official ban, the film has been hidden from the Indian public. As for the CSDS, the Indian Council of Social Science Research has applied a funding chokehold that threatens the existence of a 63-year-old research centre that has done important work on India’s elections, among others.
This manoeuvre against CSDS recalls the anaconda tactics used to systematically dismantle the Centre for Policy Research, one of India’s premier think tanks, in 2024. While no one would accuse BJP-led governments of being champions of free expression, the Taslima Nasrin caper needs to be considered for its foreign policy fallout. Across the border in Bangladesh, the writer is sure to be a red rag to the new regime in Dhaka, which is vulnerable to pressure from anti-India student groups and the Jamaat-e-Islami. As it is, New Delhi is harbouring former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who faces a death sentence in her country. By adding the Taslima fuel to the fire, what exactly is India investing in vis a vis Bangladesh: peaceful relations or further turmoil?