Times of India, 22 Dec 2007
In response to demands from a few religious fundamentalists, India's democratic and secular government has placed a writer of international repute under virtual house arrest. Shorn of all cant, that is what the Centre's treatment of Taslima Nasreen amounts to. She was forced into exile from her native Bangladesh because of the books she had written. Now it looks as if the UPA government is about to repeat the same gesture by placing intolerable restrictions on her stay in India.
She is living under guard in an undisclosed location. She will not be allowed to come out in public or meet people, including her friends. Without quite saying so, the government is clearly sending her a message that she isn't welcome in India and ought to leave. Earlier, she was turfed out of West Bengal by the state government. It's not quite clear who's ahead in the competition to pander to fundamentalist opinion, the Centre or the West Bengal government. Earlier, Left Front chairman Biman Bose had said that Taslima should leave Kolkata if her stay disturbed the peace, but had to retract the statement later. Now external affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee echoes Bose by asking whether it is "desirable" to keep her in Kolkata if that "amounts to killing 10 people". In other words, if somebody says or writes something and somebody else gets sufficiently provoked to kill 10 people, then it is not the killer's but the writer's fault.
That is an astounding statement for the foreign minister of a liberal democratic state to make. The Greek philosopher Plato thought that artists were dangerous people and exiled them from his ideal Republic. But such views can hardly be reconciled with modern democracy, which survives on tolerance. Demo-cracy also accords a valuable place to the arts, where boundaries are pushed and new thinking becomes possible. Taslima's views on women's rights may seem threatening from the point of view of patriarchal codes governing society. That would explain why the animus towards her is not confined to Muslim conservatives, but includes Congress and Left luminaries.
The ministry of external affairs must think through the implications of what it is doing. If it forces Taslima out of the country, India will be placed on the same platform as Bangladesh, which is close to becoming a failed state. At a time when India's image is ascendant in world affairs the official guardians of that image must not act like weaklings who cave in to every illiberal or fundamentalist threat to this republic's constitutional values.
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