Taslima Nasrin has been exported out of India at last.
Taslima was very ill in the concentration camp somewhere in New Delhi. The regemented Gestapo in Bengal exiled her to appease its winning Muslim Vote bank amidst Nandigram singur Insurrection.
Now operation Taslim is done with surgical precision thanks to defacto prime Minster Pranab Mukherjee. Taslim suffered Heart attack in the concentration camp and faced blinding dangers ahead. She continued to write some poetry meanwhile.
I am posting some updates and references to highlight the event.
Palash Biswas
India World News | Home
New Delhi - Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, who lives in exile in India, said on Monday that she wants to lead a normal life and needs to go abroad soon to de-stress herself, according to news reports. The 45-year-old Bengali author has been confined to a "safe house" somewhere in New Delhi after she was forced to leave West Bengal's state capital Kolkata in November 2007 following violent protests by Muslim fundamentalist groups who said her writings were offensive to Islam.
The stress of the past seven-and-a-half months had affected her health, PTI news agency quoted Nasreen as saying from an undisclosed location.
She said she had been suffering from a heart disease and retinopathy, an eye ailment.
"I have to leave this impossible situation. I cannot interact with people. I cannot any more take this stress which has led to hypertension," she said.
"I want to lead a de-stressed life and I want to live life to the full," the controversial author said but did not reveal where she would be going.
Asked if she would return to India after medical treatment, Nasreen said she would love to come back and live in her favourite city Kolkata if she was allowed to lead a normal life.
Nasreen had said in December that the Indian government was not allowing her to return to her adopted city of Kolkata and had put her under "house arrest" in Delhi, a claim which was rejected by the Indian Foreign Ministry.
Nasreen has been living outside Bangladesh since 1994 - first in various European countries and then in Kolkata - after Islamic fundamentalist groups in her country issued a fatwa against her writings.
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Rajnish Sharma
Monday, March 17, 2008 (New Delhi)
Controversial Bangladeshi novelist Taslima Nasreen has confirmed that she has decided to leave India for treatment.
According to sources, Taslima has taken the decision primarily because of her medical condition.
She has high blood pressure and an eye problem. Her friends feel that the tight security around her is creating mental pressure and affecting her health.
A section of people in India has been opposed to her stay in India and have been demanded that her visa be cancelled.
After violent protests against her in Kolkata, where she has been staying, Taslima was shifted to an unknown location in New Delhi under the security of central government.
In recent months she has been in bad health conditions and was even admitted to AIIMS.
Story Finder 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002
Taslima Nasrin to leave India
Lindesay Irvine
Monday March 17, 2008
guardian.co.uk
'Denied urgent medical attention' ... Taslima Nasrin. Photograph: Martin Bureau/AFP
The exiled Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin has announced that she will leave India, claiming the conditions she has been living under in Delhi amount to "virtual house arrest" and that she has been denied urgent medical attention.
Nasrin fled Bangladesh in 1994 when a court ruled she had "deliberately and maliciously" hurt the feelings of religious Muslims. Her books remain banned in the country.
After a decade in Europe, she moved to Kolkata in 2004, where she planned to settle, but came under increasing pressure from Muslim groups' protests at her "anti-Islamic" novels and memoirs. These culminated last November in violent protests which saw her taken under government protection to a safe house in the Delhi area.
Article continues
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According to Nasrin, her health has deteriorated dangerously under the stress of her situation, and she has been refused proper access to doctors for a serious heart condition, as well as visits from friends. In a distraught email to journalists, Nasrin said last night that a government keen to see her leave has kept her away from doctors for what it claims are "security reasons".
Nasrin, who holds a Swedish passport, said that she now has no option but to leave India. She said today: "I have to leave as soon as possible. but I can't tell you where i am going".
Cathy McCann, Asia researcher at the writers' association International PEN, said the organisation was unaware of Nasrin's health problems. "Our focus is on the impunity with which the Indian government is treating the attacks against her." She added that Nasrin's situation could be resolved if the Indian government were to issue a full condemnation of the protests.
No official of the Indian government has so far been available for comment.
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Home :: March 2008
No Place to Hide
How can there be even the pretense of free speech or freedom under laws like these? All over the country, not just journalists and writers, but anybody who disagrees with the government's plans is being arrested, tortured and imprisoned. Sometimes murdered. This is the beginning of either civil war, or the annihilation of the poor. Once that genie is out of the bottle, it won't go back
Arundhati Roy, Delhi, Hardnews
I would like to caution us all against looking at this issue, in particular the issue of Taslima Nasrin, through the single lens of a battle between religious fundamentalism and secular liberalism. Taslima Nasrin herself sometimes contributes to that view. In her website she says:
"Humankind is facing an uncertain future...In particular, the conflict is between two different ideas, secularism and fundamentalism. To me, this conflict is basically between modern, rational, logical thinking and irrational, blind faith. ... It is a conflict between the future and the past, between innovation and tradition, between those who value freedom and those who do not."
How strange it is then, that it was the West Bengal government - led by the CPM, a party that sees itself as the vanguard of secularism, modern, logical and rational thinking - that banned Dwikhondito by Taslima Nasrin, not once, but twice. Twice, the Association of People for Democratic Rights (APDR), successfully challenged the ban in the Calcutta High Court. The book was published, and for four years people in Bengal read it and Taslima Nasrin lived in Calcutta. And there the matter remained - without incident.
Then Nandigram happened. Muslims and Dalits bore the brunt of the government's attack. The CPI(M) began to worry about losing the 'Muslim vote'. So it played the 'Taslima card'. A report by Mohammed Safi Samsi in the Indian Express (December 2, 2007) tells the story.
The government launched its operation to 're-capture' Nandigram at the end of October, 2007:
On November 1, Path Sanket, a CPM magazine, published an anonymous letter supporting Taslima Nasrin, adding some gratuitous insults of its own against Prophet Mohammed. On November 8, the government banned the magazine and a member of the editorial team called printing the letter a 'historic blunder'. But, of course, vernacular newspapers re-published the letter. Photocopies of the letter were then distributed in Muslim-dominated localities.
On November 21 - a week after more than 60,000 people marched on the streets protesting the government's actions in Nandigram - the little-known All India Muslim Front organised a protest that then 'erupted' in violence. The army was called in. The government deported Taslima Nasrin from West Bengal.
And today, we are all gathered here to discuss Free Speech. Not the recapture of Nandigram or the continuing terrorising, humiliation and rape of the people who live there.
It seems pretty clear that the threat to Free Speech comes as much from chemical hubs and iron ore mines - and from the project of land-grab, enclosure and mass displacement, as it does from religious fundamentalism. To not see this is to fall into a trap that has been cleverly laid for us.
Religious fundamentalists, especially those from minority communities, are often inadvertently playing out a script that has been pre-written for them. Their outrage, genuine though it may be, has become a dependable, predictable and an extremely useful political device to further the agendas of others.
The principle of Free Speech and Expression has to negotiate many, many fundamentalisms. Religious fundamentalism, ultra-nationalist fundamentalism, market fundamentalism among others... Sometimes they are intertwined in the strangest ways.
Liberals often make the mistake of believing that Free Speech is a fundamental right given to us by the Indian Constitution - and that when it is curbed either by the State or by vigilante militias and thugs, the Constitution is being subverted. This is not true. Free Speech is not our Constitutional Right. It is a contained right, beset with caveats - caveats that are always used by the powerful to control and dominate those who are powerless.
Now, we have a slew of new laws - that make not just Free Speech, but 'Freedom' itself in India a pathetic joke, a distant dream. There is the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) which incorporates some of the worst provisions of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) and Terrorist & Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA). There is the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA), the Madhya Pradesh Control of Organised Crime Act (MPCOCA) and the utterly draconian Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act (CSPSA).
Some of these laws contain provisions whose sole purpose seems to be to criminalise everybody and then leave the government free to decide at leisure whom to imprison. Under the CSPSA and the UAPA, for example, the government is free to arbitrarily ban any organisation without giving any specific reason for placing the ban.
Here is how the CSPSA defines an 'organisation':
"Organization" means any combination, body or group of persons whether known by any distinctive name or not and whether registered under any relevant law or not and whether governed by any written constitution or not.
Remember, the vaguer the provisions in the law, the wider the net it casts, the greater the threat to civil and democratic rights.
Here is how the CSPA defines an 'unlawful activity':
"Any action taken by such (banned) individual or organisation whether by committing an act or by words either spoken or written or by signs or by visible representation or otherwise..."
And then these are some sub-clauses that widen the net:
(i) which constitutes a danger or menace to public order, peace or tranquility
(iii) which interferes or tends to interfere with maintenance of public order
And, remarkably...
(vi) of encouraging or preaching disobedience to established law and its institutions.
In Section 8(5) it says that ...
Whoever commits or abets or attempts to commit or abet or plans to commit any unlawful activity shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to seven years.
So now they have mind readers in the Chhattisgarh government, as well as Seers.
How can there be even the pretense of Free Speech or freedom under laws like these? All over the country, not just journalists and writers, but anybody who disagrees with the government's plans is being arrested, tortured and imprisoned. Sometimes murdered. (The names and details of some of these are listed and available and I can give them to you later.)
Govind Kutty, the editor of People's March, a publication banned for being sympathetic to Maoist ideology, has been arrested and imprisoned. The Maoists have as much right to the Freedom of Expression, as much right to place their ideology - however abhorrent the government or anybody else may believe it to be - in the public domain, in the so-called 'market place of ideas' as anybody else does.
I believe that the ban on People's March should be lifted immediately and its editor unconditionally released.
Finally, I would like to say that the battle for Free Speech must not turn into a battle that limits itself to the freedom of writers, journalists and artists alone. We are not the only ones who deserve this right. A friend from Chhattisgarh recently told me of a doctor who had been arrested because a prescription of his had been found in some 'naxalite kit', whatever that means.
In Chhattisgarh, 644 villages have been evacuated of their inhabitants. That's more than 300,000 people - displacement on a mass scale, which is eventually intended to clear space for corporate mining interests. Fifty thousand people have been moved into police camps and have become recruits for the dreaded Salwa Judum. Tens of thousands of people have fled to neighbouring states to escape the horror. Nobody is allowed to go back to their villages, or to cultivate their land. What is freedom of expression for a farmer? The buzz in town is that a new law is on the anvil, which says that if farmland has not been cultivated for two years it can be diverted for non-agricultural purposes.
Every form of resistance, peaceful or otherwise, is being shut down by the State. Of all the cases on the anvil, the goldfish in a bowl, the dire, menacing warning to us all and to anybody who may be entertaining the idea "of encouraging or preaching disobedience to established law and its institutions" is the continued imprisonment of Dr Binayak Sen under false charges, underpinned by blatantly fabricated evidence.
Dr Binayak Sen, who has worked as a civil rights activist with the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) and a doctor in the area for more than 30 years, was arrested last May, charged under the CSPSA, UAPA and Indian Penal Code (IPC). He has been in prison for eight months, denied bail even by the Supreme Court.
By imprisoning someone like Binayak Sen, the government is trying to close out the option of peaceful resistance, of democratic space. It is creating a polarisation along the lines of the Bush Doctrine: "If you are not with us you are with the terrorists - in which people only have the choice between succumbing to displacement and destitution, or resisting by going underground and taking up arms. This is the beginning of either civil war, or the annihilation of the poor. Once that genie is out of the bottle, it won't go back. There are reports that the Chhattisgarh government has asked for 70 battalions of para-military forces - beyond the 17 battalions that are already there. A four-fold increase. I fear the worst.
And so, from this platform, I would like to ask for the granting of citizenship to Taslima Nasrin, for the immediate and unconditional release of Binayak Sen, Govind Kutty and the other journalists whose names have been mentioned at this press conference (Prashant Rahi from Uttarakhand, Prafull Jha from Chhattisgarh, Srisailum from Andhra Pradesh and P Govindan Kutti of People's March, Kerala). Experienced journalists and peaceful activists who understand the realities of the situation are the only hope of righting this ship that is tilting dangerously and about to tip over. If it does tip over, everybody will suffer, the poor definitely, but the rich too. There will be no hiding place. I urge those present here to pay keen attention to the spectre that is looming before us. And to begin a campaign demanding the repeal of these very frightening new laws that do not merely threaten free speech, but freedom itself.
Speech delivered at the Press Club of India, Delhi, February 13, 2008
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Home page > 2008 > March 15, 2008 > What is Fundamentalism?
Mainstream, Vol XLVI, No 13
What is Fundamentalism?
Sunday 16 March 2008, by From NC’s Writings
Fundamentalism has become a much-used term today—in politics and in the academia. And there are in vogue various types of the so-called fundamentalists—political, religious and cultural.
But before cataloguing these various tribes of fundamentalists, it is important to clarify what precisely is meant by fundamentalism. The Oxford English Dictionary says the term, fundamental, pertains to “the basis or groundwork, going to the root of the matter”. But the word “fundamentalism” has a particularly Christian connotation which, according to the dictionary, is:
The strict maintenance of traditional orthodox religious beliefs or doctrines especially belief in the inerrancy of Scripture and literal acceptance of the creeds as fundamentals of Protestant Christianity.
The BBC English Dictionary is more to the point:
Fundamentalism is belief in the original form of a religion, without accepting any later ideas.
The context in which the term has been coined is, therefore, specially Christian. Following this interpretation, an orthodox group in any religion is today dubbed as fundamentalist—the conservative no-changers, the orthodox as opposed to the liberal within any religion—which amounts to promoting intolerance and bigotry. Within Christianity, however, the fundamentalists suffered the first setback when Martin Luther raised his voice of dissent in the fifteenth century—out of which was born the Protestant sect within the Catholic Church. Since then many other dissident streams flowed within Christianity, while orthodoxy was reinforced by Jesuit militancy.
Projecting the same format, the orthodox extremists in Islam are branded as fundamentalists—those who have asked for Salman Rushdie’s head and are now clamouring for Taslima Nasreen’s. Bigotry is their acknowledged badge, the mentality that would brook no liberal trend nor any special reforms within the Muslim society. Obviously, such Islamic fundamentalists never favoured Sufism which had blossomed in Kashmir—a conflict which manifests itself even today within the militants’ camp in Kashmir between the Pakistan-backed Hizbul fundamentalist group and the JKLF which stands for the independence of Kashmir, carrying the banner of Sufism. In the rest of Muslim India, there is some stirrings for social reforms—witness the latest stand of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, acknowledgedly an authoritative body, which in its recent meeting has called upon the Muslim community for a campaign against alcoholism, gambling and dowry—the last item, if seriously carried out, is bound to impinge on the Muslim marriage customs as they prevail at present.
Modernist trends within Islam are noticed in many countries of the Muslim world stretching from Iran to Indonesia. There was at one time an intellectual trend, mainly on the Mediterranean coast, which sought to equal Islam with Marxism. However, a peculiar feature in the Indian subcontinent has been that the liberal elements among the Muslims have bothered little to raise the consciousness of the Muslim community as a whole. They seem to have preferred a liberal island of their own leaving the community as a whole to the dead-hand grip of the orthodox elements. Salman Rushdie and Taslima Nasreen certainly deserve the support of all those who stand for basic human rights; at the same time it would not be incorrect to say that by their downright stand, they have emerged individually as emancipated souls, while leaving the field clear for the mullahs to malign them as anti-Islam. A reform movement has to start from the level of consciousness of the people for whom it is meant; otherwise there is the danger of isolating oneself from the target segment of the community and thereby reinforce the reactionary wing itself. It is this alienation of the forward-looking elements like Rushdie and Nasreen which strengthens bigotry instead of effectively fighting it.
This has proved true in the case of the Hindu community as well. The early reform movements like the Brahmo Samaj and the Arya Samaj combated some of the pernicious features of the Hindu society, particularly the iniquitous caste system, the dowry and women’s deprived status. However, these trends have practically expended themselves as their programmes have by and large been absorbed by the community as a whole at least at the formal level. In the present-day conditions, they look ineffective in raising another reform movement within the community. As in the Muslim community, here also the orthodox bigotry has been practically left untouched, despite the fact that many movements of social emancipation from Narayan Guru to the Dalits have appeared, claiming considerable following.
It is precisely because of this fact of the conservative orthodox core having escaped the onslaught of modern liberal trend in both the Hindu and Muslim societies that it appears as the real boss of both the communities, and thereby attract the attention of the political elements who look upon them as guarantors for vote-banks at the election time. This writer recalls the life-style of Shyamaprasad Mukherji, the founder of the Jana Sangh. He was certainly a devout Hindu, but was no adherent of all the rituals that the Hindu orthodoxy have stood for. He was certainly no brown sahib but by conscious preference a desi leader who could hardly be demarcated from a Congress leader of corresponding standing. Those of us who have personally known Shyamaprasad Babu from our university days can vouch for his liberal outlook on many issues, social and cultural. He was at home with Congress leaders like B.C. Roy, Sarat Bose and Kiran Shankar Roy. As for his criticism of Gandhiji, this was mainly over the question of separate electorate for the Muslim community (which Gandhiji had also disapproved in principle but could do nothing to change it as he did in the case of the Scheduled Castes). There were critics of Gandhiji on this score within the Congress as well such as Madanmohan Malviya and Ramananda Chattopadhyay and even Meher Chand Khanna, apart from Dr Moonje and Jagat Narain Lal. This is perhaps equally true of the present generation of BJP leaders like Advani and Vajpayee—not to speak of the late-comers and new-comers like Jaswant Singh, T.N. Chaturvedi or for that matter, General Candeth, whose father incidentally was a distinguished figure in the Brahmo Samaj.
The point to note is that the political leaders of the Jana Sangh and the BJP chose to take within the camp the more aggressive militant elements—the bigoted fringe like the VHP or the individual stars like Sadhavi Rithambara and Uma Bharati—for the purpose of mobilising votes. It is this alliance which has posed a problem for the BJP today, and the more astute leadership of the party would have to decide whether it should let the militants wreck the prospects of the party in the arena of parliamentary politics, or delink itself from them. This was the quandary of the Akali leadership ten years ago, and by evading to face it, mature leaders like Prakash Singh Badal found themselves in political wilderness. In contrast, the CPI-M leadership made short-shrift of their militant fundamentalists symbolised by Naxalism, and threw them out of the party and even took police action against the extremists when they first raised their head in the sixties. From all this one has to draw the conclusion that a political party to make any headway along the road of parliamentary politics, has to abjure and combat fundamentalism. Somehow fundamentalism is a total misfit in the parlour of parliamentary politics.
There are of course other variants of fundamentalism—some of these rather bizarre. A recent example is Namboodiripad’s sudden outburst against Gandhiji as having been a fundamentalist. Knowing as one does Namboodiripad’s past views on Gandhiji—he even wrote a mild-mannered critique of Gandhiji’s politics and philosophy—it came as a surprise that he should brand him as a fundamentalist. This was no doubt embarrassing for the CPI-M leadership which has promptly disowned the views of this reverend elder brother. What may be said by way of explanation—not attenuation—of Namboodiripad’s latest views on Gandhiji, is that he is mixing up fundamentalism with devout attachment to any religious belief on the individual plane. Within the Communist hierarchy, Namboodiripad, as the present writer has long known, could be regarded as a moderate in contrast to a rigid doctrinaire Marxist like B.T. Ranadive. One recalls Ranadive’s personal view that nobody could be eligible for membership of the Communist Party unless and until one became an atheist. Lenin, on the other hand, had said in one of his writings that even a practising priest could apply for Party membership if he had supported a workers’ strike struggle.
(Mainstream, August 20, 1994)
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