India: Strong denial for granting residence to anti-Islam writer

Leaders of India Muslim community have been voicing increasing anger at Indian government’s latest decision to grant long-term residence permit to Bangladeshi exiled author Taslima Nasrin, who has been ridiculing Islam for many years.

"Contrary to the practice in India, she gets residence permit which is being extended regularly,” Zafarul-Islam Khan, the national president of All India Muslim Majlis-e-Mushawarat (AIMMM), told OnIslam.net.

"It is difficult to understand and rationalize why a section of the Indian ruling class, spanning over Congress and BJP, is so keen to provide shelter to someone who is a fugitive from law in her own country.

"I find it strange that the same ruling class, which is eager to offer refuge to a foreigner, did not bother to protect one of its greatest living artists, MF Husain, who was forced to live in exile by Hindutva goons and had to die in an alien land,” Khan, who is also the editor of Muslim community newspaper, added.

Khan is one of angry Indian Muslims who rejected the recent government decision to grant Nasrin a long-term residence permit.

A medical doctor-turned-writer, Nasrin fled Bangladesh in 1994 after her debut novel “Lajja” was banned in which she allegedly called for changes in the Qur’an and some antagonized Bangladeshi Muslim groups issued death threats against her.

After spending 11 years in Europe and the US, she moved to India in 2004.

Since she wrote in Bengali and preferred to live in a Bengali environment, she began living in Kolkata in 2005 by renting a house that she called her “second home”.

But, after some Indian Urdu newspapers in 2007 carried translation of parts of Nasrin’s controversial autobiography “Dwikhandito”, in which she allegedly maligned the character of the Prophet apart from criticizing Islam, Indian Muslims began turning against her.