Goodbye Taslima, shame on India

sujoy

Sujoy Dhar is a senior journalist who heads the Kolkata bureau of Indo-Asian News Service (IANS). A regular contributor to several national and international publications, he also runs Trans World Features.

In this exclusive column for sify.com, Dhar argues that Taslima Nasreen’s decision to leave India following her virtual house arrest is a body blow to the country’s secular credentials.

Dhar can be reached at sujoydhar@gmail.com

As she broke the news to me over the phone on Monday morning, I felt indignant and helpless. "I can't take it anymore like this, I am leaving finally," she said. "They did not even allow me to go back to Kolkata to collect my things, you guys are there, take care of those."

They won, secular India lost. Taslima Nasreen is finally leaving India for Europe, unable to cope with life in solitary confinement in the dungeons of "safe houses"- or should we call it gulags for cultural offences? - that exist in free India. Safe houses are nice places to cage species like a "Muslim woman writer with a big mouth."

'Without Kolkata, Taslima the writer will die'

As she spoke, her defeated voice trailing and choking at times, my mind went back to a speech our Prime Minister Manmohan Singh gave at the SAARC summit in Dhaka in 2005. I recalled Singh mentioning the dangers of failed states around India.
The Taslima episode punches holes in Prime Minister Singh's tall claims about India's pretensions to occupy the moral high ground in the subcontinent.

The India of “secular and illustriously progressive” Bengali leaders like Pranab Mukherjee, Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi and Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has failed more miserably than the failed states that encircle India. There is only one expression to sum up the Taslima episode: Shame.

Last year while browsing through a copy of Time magazine I came across an interesting article by their India correspondent Simon Robinson. After a day's harrowing experience in the new shining India where mobile phones don't catch signals and roads are in a deplorable condition, he wrote of an India without slogans like India Shining or Incredible India.

Robinson writes: “I came to India looking forward to a place with a sense of momentum and hope. I knew India was still poor and frustrating as well as fascinating and exciting and full of great stories. I have found all those things, but I have also realised that parts of Africa have better services and infrastructure than India, and just as good prospects for development. It’s just that Africa hasn’t yet come up with a catchy slogan to sell itself. I hope it doesn't. Better to be surprised than disappointed.”

Taslima writes something similar as she prepares to leave after being confined to a room for nearly four months by the merry band of Congress and communist leaders who rule democratic India as if it were their fiefdom.

A portion of her email to friends in media reads like this: “I used to call this the torture chamber. I gradually came to realise that it was the chamber of death instead. I was not even allowed to stay in hospital for long though the doctors felt it was necessary in order to stabilise my blood pressure. But then, orders are orders and the government did not want to be inconvenienced by me in any way whatsoever. The government did not want the media to know I had been hospitalised. I did not have my mobile phone with me and the doctors at the government's hospital –AIIMS – were instructed to discharge me after a certain period of time.

Curiously though, the decision was not left to the doctors as to what this certain period of time was to be. The last time I was admitted to this hospital a few weeks ago I was suddenly discharged as a result of governmental pressure. At this undisclosed location I am neither allowed to go to a doctor for consultation nor is one allowed to come to me. I suffer from severely fluctuating blood pressure and the strange thing is that I was not even allowed to speak to any of the doctors at the hospital over the telephone. Even after repeated requests I was not given a single phone number.

When I was in hospital, I asked the doctors if I could call them if necessary but they said that they were not allowed to hand out their numbers. I had to make inquiries through officials to get even the simplest of answers from these doctors. I have suffered tremendously both physically and mentally. My blood pressure is now impossible to control. The doctors say it is due to stress, which I must avoid at all costs. How can I not be stressed when everything is continuously stressing me out? I am brought to this place and incarcerated like some animal; my human rights constantly and continually violated. I am not allowed to step out or meet anyone. How can I not be stressed?”

I first met Taslima Nasreen in 2003 for an interview at a hotel in Kolkata. She was not feeling too well. She had drunk some red wine at a party the previous night and it did no good to her. There were guards posted outside her room at Kolkata's Great Eastern Hotel.

I didn't find her too interesting at first, but there emerged many colourful stories about her as she spoke. I was pleasantly surprised by her candour.

To be honest, there was little I had read of Taslima. Though I did read with curiosity and appreciation her fearless pieces on the status of women in Bangladesh published in the form of Nirbachito Kolam (Selected Columns), despite finding them a tad repetitive.

I had read a pirated version of her book Lajja (Shame), Taslima’s response to the anti-Hindu riots that erupted in parts of Bangladesh after the 1992 Babri Masjid demolition.

The pirated version was in circulation all over West Bengal, especially on suburban trains, where they sold like cheap skin ointments. The literary standard was a big disappointment, but her courage made up for the inadequacy. I met her several times later for stories and interviews. But it is her life in confinement that brought me closer to her for my own selfish reasons as a mainstream journalist. At one point, she referred to me as a “friend”.. Our courage is under fire, Taslima, I refuse the friendship! It is a tall order to be your friend.

But we are not discussing Taslima the writer here.

I have time and again heard that Taslima is just lucky enough to be compared with such literary greats as Salman Rushdie. But even if Taslima is lucky on that count, having made it to the Ivy League of writers on the run like Rushdie, luck finally ran out for her.

Rushdie had chosen the UK, but this poor lady with a big mouth and a penchant for the Bengali language chose Kolkata. The communists in West Bengal had marked her, ever since she went to court against them and obtained a favourable verdict to lift the ban on one of her autobiographical books – Dwikhandita.

Taslima has repeatedly been accused of using media to further her interests. My interactions with her over the years as a journalist tell a different story.
She herself is fodder for us. A Muslim woman open about her sexuality and “disparaging” about Islam is a heady concoction. So journalists like us looking for juicy copy to keep the job fires burning ran after her. At no point of time did I think Taslima was trying to sensationalise her life. Rather, her soft, dispassionate voice, often betrays no emotions.
Of late she would constantly ask us: “What do you think they plan to do with me?” We had no answers.

I hope many of those reading this column would be among the younger generation.
Our generation grew up to find the winsomely suave Rajiv Gandhi as Prime Minister, painting the progressive image of a new India on the highway to telecom revolution. But we also recall vaguely the hue and cry over the infamous Shah Bano divorce lawsuit in the 1980s.

Shah Bano, a 62-year old Muslim woman and mother of five from Madhya Pradesh, found herself unceremoniously divorced and without an alimony in 1978. The Muslim family law allows the husband to divorce his wife without her consent. The husband just needs to say the word talaaq before witnesses to obtain a valid divorce

An impoverished Shah Bano had approached the courts for securing maintenance from her husband. When the case reached the Supreme Court of India, seven years were already gone. The Supreme Court invoked Section 125 of Code of Criminal Procedure, which applies to everyone regardless of caste, creed, or religion. It ruled that Shah Bano be given alimony. The orthodox Muslims were quick to react. The Congress government of Rajiv Gandhi buckled.
In 1986, the Congress passed an act, The Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act 1986, that nullified the Supreme Court's judgment in the Shah Bano case.

More than two decades after Shah Bano's fight for justice was trampled by political opportunism and vote bank politics, External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee cautions Taslima against speaking out if she wants to stay in ‘Incredible India’. His arrogant colleague, Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi, commands her to bend her head before the Muslims.

West Bengal's poet-king Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee is at peace now, having rid himself of the woman who dares to stay in his oasis (read Bengal) without paying cultural taxes to the party.

Taslima lost, Incredible India won!!

The views expressed in the article are the author’s and not of Sify.com.

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