Holed up under heavy security cover in the Indian capital New Delhi for the second day running on Sunday, controversial Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen said she wanted to return "home" to the eastern city of Kolkata. Nasreen, 45, also a feminist and human rights activist, has long been a target of right-wing Muslim groups for her critical comments on the way Islam treats women.
The author was forced to leave Kolkata, her home for over three years, after angry protests demanding her eviction led to violence and riots on Wednesday. Nasreen first flew to Jaipur, capital of India's western Rajasthan state, where she spent a night in a hotel. Friday night was spent at a guest house in adjoining Haryana. She reached New Delhi on Saturday and is staying at a Rajasthan government-run guest house under heavy security cover.
Officials of India's federal intelligence bureau and the Ministry of Home affairs have been holding talks with the Bangladeshi author on various options open to her.
"She does not want to leave India. She is insistent that she wants to go back to Kolkata," a home ministry official said. He refused to give further details of arrangements being made for Nasreen, but it is likely that she would be taken to a safe house somewhere in India until it is considered appropriate for her to return to Kolkata, the Hindustan Times newspaper reported.
Nasreen, who worked as a government physician in Bangladesh, first came under attack in 1993 after her critical comments on Islam in local newspaper columns. Fundamentalists issued a fatwa and offered a bounty for her death.
The release of her novella Lajja (Shame) in 1993, which drew attention to the state-sponsored persecution and dwindling numbers of the Hindu minority in Bangladesh, further angered conservative Muslims, and her passport was confiscated by the government.
Threats to her life forced Nasreen out of Bangladesh in 1994 and she lived in several European countries, including Sweden, Germany and France, as well as the United States before setting up base in Kolkata, capital of India's communist-ruled West Bengal state in 2004.
The author has been avoiding the media in an effort to avert fresh controversy. But in a brief appearance on NDTVtelevision channel, she said: "Right now all I want to say is that I miss my home. I miss my Kolkata. I want to go back to Kolkata."
But for the moment, Nasreen remains what The Times of India termed a "political hot potato." West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharjee told a rally on Sunday that Nasreen had not been forced to leave Kolkata and was free to return to the state whenever she liked, PTI news agency reported.
His comments came a day after Rajasthan's Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party government issued a strong statement accusing the West Bengal government of not supporting the author despite its supposedly secular credentials.
India's federal United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government seems divided on the issue, with Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee of the alliance's main Congress Party saying the government was not averse to extending Nasreen's visa which is due to expire on February 7, 2008.
But federal Railways Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav of the Rashtriya Janata Dal, another UPA constituent, said Nasreen should desist from writing blasphemous articles against Islam or any other religion. "If anyone writes blasphemous articles against Islam, it is bound to create tension," Yadav was quoted as saying by PTI news agency. He declined to comment on whether Nasreen should be deported from India.
More than 80 per cent of India's 1.1 billion people follow the Hindu religion, but the country also has more than 120 million Muslims, one of the largest populations of the faith in the world. Muslim groups in West Bengal as well as in other states have been complaining against Nasreen's writings for years.