“I will appeal to the Union Home Ministry not to give any resident permit to Taslima Nasreen,” said Sultan Ahmed, an influential minority leader and a sitting TMC MP from West Bengal told bdnews24.com in New Delhi.
Last week Indian Home Minister Rajnath Singh assured Nasreen of looking in to her request for a resident permit in India.
Immediately after the Bangladeshi author expressed her willingness to stay in India forever, Ahmed said that the government at the Centre should not entertain a “foreign writer” by compromising with the "sentiments of Crores of Indian Muslims".
“Earlier the UPA government had played politics by giving her residential permit…and now the BJP government is doing the same,” said Ahmed.
The TMC leader’s statement assumes significance, as Nasreen always consider West Bengal her second home.
In fact, since her ouster from Bangladesh in 1994 for “hurting religious sentiments” with her novel “Lajja”, the writer took refuge in Kolkata in 2004.
But after violent protest in the city in November of 2007, the erstwhile Left front government whisked her away to New Delhi before she was forced to leave India.
It is only in 2011 that she got the permission to live in India.
Nasreen was also not allowed to participate in this year’s Kolkata Book fair. State government had also banned her book ‘Nishiddho’.
Ahmed, the Trinamool leader said that Bengal is the land of Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, Kazi Nazrul Islam and “there is no place for people like Nasreen to live here.”
The Bangladeshi writer has applied for a resident permit and the Indian Home Ministry granted her the same but only for two months beginning Aug 1.
Government sources told this correspondent, that the concerned department in the Home Ministry is verifying her application before taking any decision.
Living in exile for two decades, Nasreen claimed that then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi (present Indian Prime Minister) had supported her on a couple of occasions when she was forced to exit West Bengal in 2007.