National

BJP: West Bengal evicted Taslima

NEW DELHI: The Bharatiya Janata Party on Saturday alleged that Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen was “forcibly evicted” and “virtually deported” to Rajasthan by the Left Front government in West Bengal.

The party said the writer was brought to Delhi late on Friday night by the Rajasthan government “because she wanted to come here” and she “continued to be its honoured guest at the Rajasthan House.”

BJP sources claimed that Ms. Nasreen “told her story” to a senior police officer from Rajasthan who accompanied her here from Jaipur. According to this story, Ms. Nasreen, after landing in Jaipur on Thursday evening, told Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje over telephone that she would prefer to go back to Kolkata. At this, tickets were arranged for flying her back and the Kolkata police informed, but “the West Bengal police flatly refused” indicating they would not be able to make security arrangements for her. Then the plan to send her to Kolkata was cancelled.

Ms. Nasreen told Rajasthan authorities that Delhi would be her next preference. “It was then that the Rajasthan government made arrangements to bring her here and organised her secure stay,” said BJP spokesman Prakash Javadekar, who also met the writer in the evening.

Mr. Javadekar said the Taslima issue “exposed the so-called secularism of the CPI(M). The party failed to protect her. It evicted her forcibly from West Bengal instead of dealing with those who had threatened her.”

(Violence occurred in parts of Kolkata on Wednesday during protests demanding cancellation of Ms. Nasreen’s visa.) Mr. Javadekar told reporters that the West Bengal police informed the Rajasthan police that they were sending Ms. Nasreen to Jaipur only after she was put on a plane.

The author has made India her home after she was hounded out of her country by Islamic fundamentalists protesting against her novel Lajja.

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