Marxists bungle on

Bibhuti Bhusan Nandy
The Statesman, 6 December

Long before Bangla deshi author Taslima Nasreen thought of seeking shelter in India, Comrade Biman Bose had joined the chorus of calumny and disinformation against her, orchestrated by the Bangladesh Directorate of Forces Intelligence (DGFI) at home and abroad.

At a drink and dinner session arranged by the DGFI at the residence of Mr Humayun Kabir, deputy high commissioner of Bangladesh in Kolkata, soon after the publication of Nasreen’s Lajja, the comrade said the Bangladeshi writer was a “paid agent of RAW” and she had written the book at the instance of the Government of India.

As a former Intelligence professional, this writer is in a position to confirm that other guests at the dinner, including RSP leader Mr Khiti Goswami and his wife, CPI-M leader Mr Manab Mukherjee, Jadavpur University’s International Relations Professor Baladas Ghosal and some journalists were flummoxed by his baleful indiscretion; their host was embarrassed as well.

One can confirm from personal knowledge that till then, Nasreen was not even known to anyone in the Indian establishment, let alone RAW, but it cannot be said with equal confidence that Mr Bose was not linked to any foreign Intelligence outfit.

Hounding Nasreen out of the Marxist haven of Kolkata to Jaipur is the latest example of the Left Front government’s policy of diversion, duplicity and decadence.

The disclosures made since the gratuitous violence had rocked the metropolis on 21 November, it is again clear that for the sake of minority votes, the pseudo-secular CPI-M leaders pander to the bigotry and intolerance of a fringe group of Muslim fanatics. In this case, they were willingly privy to provoking the orgy of violence in the city.

The manner in which Kolkata Police and a government-friendly Marwari businessman executed in tandem the “Oust Taslima Operation” perceived to be conceived and designed by Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee is reminiscent of the trader-police nexus that ruined the lawful marriage of a young couple and drove the husband to violent death. As if that was not enough, the former Kolkata Police chief Mr Prasun Mukherjee first, and Mr Vineet Goel, DC (Headquarters) later, pressured Nasreen to leave the state against her will.

The fact that Imam Sayed Mohammed Barkati of the Tipu Sultan mosque claimed that Mr Bhattacharjee had described Nasreen as “a horrible woman” is testimony to the fact that the chief minister was the master conspirator in this case. As a writer, Nasreen has been fighting for equal rights for women ~ the victims of gender bias and religious bigotry. She has raised her voice against persecution of religious minorities in Muslim societies.

Her novelette Lajja, written and published in the backdrop of the post-Babari cataclysmic Hindu-cleansing in Bangladesh, is an account of the unrestrained loot, arson, rape, destruction and desecration of Hindu temples and idols that swept rural Bangladesh in 1992.

Lajja is an indelible blot on the history of Bangladesh. The then Bangladesh Nationalist Party regime in Dhaka, in league with the Jamaat-e-Islami and other allied fundamentalist groups, wreaked vengeance on the author for “tarnishing the image of Bangladesh abroad”.

Encouraged by the cynical Bangladeshi government, mullahs mobilised Muslim masses on the streets, declared her apostate (murtad) and issued fatwas sentencing her to death. The government of Begum Khaleda Zia banned Lajja, impounded her passport and exiled her to Europe.

In 1998, she returned to Bangladesh in cognito to be at the bedside of her dying mother. When she was spotted, hell broke loose again, with mullahs baying for her blood. When her mother died, no cleric agreed to perform her burial rites. The dead woman’s crime? She was the putative mother of a daughter judged apostate by mullahs trading in religion!

The persecuted Nasreen went back into exile, in the USA this time.
In 2003, a socalled Muslim poet in Kolkata secured a court order staying the sale and circulation of Nasreen’s autobiographical piece Dwikhandita, on the allegation that it contained unsavoury, defamatory references to him.

The Marxist government of West Bengal banned the book to ingratiate itself with Muslim voters in the state. In the face of the uproar sparked off by the politically-motivated government action, the chief minister claimed that 25 writers consulted by the government believed that parts of the book could offend Muslim religious sentiments and incite communal violence.

These eminences were known to be pliable pro-establishment intellectuals and one of them had repeatedly derogated by his blasphemous writings Hindu gods and goddesses ~ Kali, Saraswati, Radha and Krishna.

The Bangladeshi military ruler General Ershad banned a feature film based on one of his books because it had hurt the religious sentiments of the Hindu community in that country.

The Marxist government’s rationale behind proscribing Dwikhandita being thus suspect, the publisher challenged its legality in Calcutta High Court. The court held the government action banning the book “unjustified and untenable”.

During the two years that the case lingered in the High Court, fundamentalist Islamic groups held street demonstrations against Nasreen, demanding cancellation of her visa. Imam Barkati, who was in the forefront of the agitation, announced monetary rewards for publicly insulting Nasreen and even issued a fatwa to behead the writer.

All the time, the state government and the police played footsie with these fundamentalist fanatics, ignoring the criminal offences, including incitement to commit murder in police presence. The state administration prevented the holding of literary seminars at Midnapore and Siliguri, which Nasreen was scheduled to address, by imposing prohibitory orders under Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code on the specious ground that these could disturb communal peace.

In August, at a book release function in Hyderabad, Majlish Itthadul Musalmeen leaders, including party MLAs and their hoodlums assaulted Nasreen to press the demand for cancellation of her visa.

The police in Congress-ruled Andhra Pradesh did not take action against the criminals, but in the face of public criticism, later registered a case. That did not deter the culprits from ganging up with the likes of Imam Barkati in Kolkata to iterate the fatwa to kill the Bangladeshi writer, with a huge police possé headed by two DCs looking the other way.

Among the people arrested for the day-long violence on 21 November are known CPI-M cadres and elements involved in the community policing programmes of the Kolkata Police. Many illegal aliens from Bangladesh were involved in the violence.

Most of the hoodlums were non-Bengali Muslim followers of the non-Bengali imam of a city mosque and were mostly from the constituencies of Mohammed Salim, MP, and Assembly Speaker Mr Hashim Abdul Halim.

Other Muslim-dominated areas in the city represented by non-Marxist parties in the Assembly were unaffected by the anti-Nasreen violence.
Except for aimlessly firing teargas shells at random, the police did not do anything to address the crisis, requiring the Army to be pressed in and night curfew imposed.

The ruling clique has showered encomiums on the police for the “patient handling” of the violence and the pliant section of the media parroted the same view.

But to anyone with a modicum of professional experience in handling law and order, it was clear the police were under instructions to allow the crescendo of violence to build up unchecked.

That was meant to prove to the world how well-founded the contention of the Marxist ruling clique was that Nasreen’s presence in West Bengal was dangerous to maintaining communal harmony in the state. And that justified Mr Bose’s fatwa, pronounced with the flourish of revolutionary cussedness that the Bangladeshi writer must leave West Bengal and its subsequent execution by Mr Goel, successor of Mr Gyanwant Singh at Lalbazar.

This operation may or may not help the CPI-M to retain its hold on minority votes in West Bengal but it could help ensure the victory of Mr Narendra Modi in the upcoming Assembly election in Gujarat.

As for Nasreen, she has since wilted under pressure and withdrawn the “objectionable” portion of Dwikhandita. After the government ban on the book, I wrote: “Taslima Nasreen is not a paragon of virtue, but she is a brave woman” (The Hindustan Times 8 December, 2003). I regret having to admit now on hindsight that the accolade I had showered on her then was premature.

(The author is a former additional secretary in the Cabinet Secretariat.)