Taslima Nasreen attacked in Hyderabad during book launch

The Times of India, 9 August 2007

HYDERABAD: Taslima Nasreen, the controversial
Bangladeshi novelist, was attacked on Thursday by
Majid-Ittehad-ul Muslimeen (MIM) activists in
Hyderabad Press club.

The attack took place during the launch of her latest book.

TV grabs showed MIM activists throwing chairs at the controversial writer.

However, no injuries have been reported. The
police and journalists came to her rescue and
avoided any major mishap.

Taslima is facing fatwas which were issued
against her for her radical views against Islam.

The author has been living in India due to
Islamic backlash in her native country.

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 Andhra MLAs lead mob attack on Taslima

CNN-IBN

August 09, 2007 at 14:13

Hyderabad: Local political activists in Hyderabad
on Thursday attacked the car of author Taslima
Nasreen when she was attending the book release
of the Telugu translation of her latest novel
Shodh.

A group of 20 MIM workers, led by MLAs Afsar
Khan, Ahmed Pasha and Mozum Khan, stormed the
Press Club premises and raised slogans against
the author.

At the concluding session of the book release,
the MIM activists barged into the conference
hall, attacked the press photographers, damaged
the furniture and glass panes and some of them
reached the dais and roughed up the novelist.

The police later took the legislators and their supporters into custody.

Later on, she was safely escorted to the airport
with the help of journalists and the organisers
of the function.

Nasreen is a controversial figure in the world of
Literature. Her books Lajja and Dwikhondito are
banned in Bangladesh.

Nasreen talks about the torture of Hindu
minorities in Bangladesh. She has been living in
exile for more than 10 years now.

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9.8.2007

 Press Statement to Condemn Attack on Tasleema Nasreen

SAHMAT strongly condemns the violent attack on
Bangladeshi Novelist Tasleema Nasreen in
Hyderabad on August 8, 2007 at a function to
release the Telugu translation of the novelist’s
latest novel Shodh.

It is reported that around 20 MIM workers led by
MLAs Afsar Khan, Ahmad Pasha and Mozum Khan
stormed the Press Club premises and raised
slogans against the author. They attacked her
with bouquets, flower pots and virtually anything
they could lay their hands on at the concluding
session of the book release.

Tasleema Nasreen has been a target of attack from
fundamentalist forces both in India and
Bangladesh and SAHMAT has always defended her
freedom of expression.

We appeal to the democratic minded people in
India to join in the condemnation of such attacks
and isolate those who preach intolerance and
violence.

Ram Rahman

M.K.Raina

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 The secular silence

Hindustan Times, August 10, 2007

by Barkha Dutt

Where are the placard-waving protestors this
time? What happened to the street marches, the
irate editorials and the lament for creative
freedom? Does our outrage choose sides this
selectively? Three legislators and a sundry
assortment of political workers from a right wing
Muslim party force their way inside the Press
Club of Hyderabad, assault Bangladeshi author
Taslima Nasreen, vandalise the venue, and then
defiantly refuse to apologise, because after all
they were God’s own warriors, or so they claim.
And yet, apart from the media’s clichéd fallback
on interviews with the usual array of “moderate”
Muslims, there’s no real evidence of anger or
disgust.

So, does the fight against fundamentalism go into
battle mode only when the enemy is the Hindu
Right?

Yaqoob Qureshi or Akbaruddin Owaisi are no
different from Praveen Togadia or Bal Thackeray.
All of them represent the dangerous politics of
intolerance and bigotry.
This isn’t really about the author or her
literary worth. Every time that zealots clash
with the zany and Religion and Freedom take
opposite positions across the trenches, the issue
becomes larger than the individual. So, yes,
perhaps Taslima Nasreen is a somewhat overrated
writer, more famous for her contrarian politics
than her turn of phrase. And yes, there are those
who argue, with good reason, that she is shrill,
clamorous of attention and somewhat obsessed with
writing kiss-and-tell accounts of her sexual
history. But none of that is really the point.

At the heart of the matter is a larger debate on
whether political correctness has twisted our
response to the principle of individual liberty.
Have our politicians in particular been shaped by
a kind of hypocrisy that makes their utterances
on creative freedom just humbug and little else?

To compare the difference, think back to how the
secular and liberal establishment reacted when
goons from the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang
Dal attacked the faculty of arts in Vadodara. A
young student was arrested for painting Jesus
Christ and Lord Vishnu in a style that employed
sexually explicit visual metaphors. The dean of
the school was suspended, but no action was taken
against those who trespassed the university,
infiltrated a private exhibition and used brute
force to gag artistic expression. The opposition
and outcry at that time was spontaneous, vocal
and unrelenting. Most of us protested against the
idea of fettering imagination with do’s and
don’ts. We didn’t really care or even know
whether the art in question was of a commendable
quality. It’s the principle we stood up for.

Yes, fear and repression may be permanent
citizens in Narendra Modi’s Gujarat. But the fact
is that this attack on Taslima Nasreen doesn’t
get to be played by different rules just because
it took place on Congress turf or because the mob
was led by Muslims instead of Hindus. The two
incidents are inarguably mirror images of each
other. Like in Gujarat, here too, the
perpetrators of violence are not just out of
jail, they have already issued fresh threats to
the writer to get out of India or face the
consequences. If a political party was seen to
sanction the assault on art in Gujarat, in this
case the mobsters belong to a political party
that is an ally of the UPA at the centre. Yes,
unlike the BJP, which was brazen enough to defend
the use of violence in Gujarat, the Congress and
the Left have been quick with their condemnation.
But over the years both parties have tiptoed
their way around the many issues that Taslima
Nasreen represents. They have looked for covert
exits from the controversies that trail her and
have sometimes succumbed when it all gets too hot
to handle. The UPA, for example, seems unable to
decide whether Taslima Nasreen should get
permission for long-term residency in India. For
now, she survives on a piecemeal arrangement
whereby she counts on a six monthly extension of
her visa (the latest extension was announced on
the same day she was assaulted.) And it was the
’progressive’ Marxist-ruled state of West Bengal
that first banned her autobiography in 2003
because it feared that the book "slandered Islam
and would incite communal violence." The Chief
Minister, known for his love of literature said
he reached the decision after he himself read the
book “several times over.” The state unit of the
Congress branded the book a "piece of
pornography," and supported the ban. Ironically,
but not surprisingly, the only party that called
the censorship of Nasreen’s work “undemocratic”
was the BJP. A party that has unapologetically
hounded artist M.F. Husain out of India for
“hurting Hindu sentiments” saw no contradiction
in suddenly playing the torchbearer for artistic
liberty.

But this is exactly what happens when political
double standards define the clash between
religious sensitivities and democratic rights. We
have seen the hypocrisy play out before when a
state Minister in Uttar Pradesh called for the
controversial Danish cartoonist’s head and even
announced a bounty of Rs 50 crore for whoever
delivered it to him. The man in question (Haji
Yaqoob Qureshi) is no longer a minister after the
change of regime in the state, but is still an
elected member of the assembly and seems to face
neither political nor social ostracisation. And
in keeping with the pattern, his party, the
self-appointed messiahs of Muslims in UP has gone
as far as defending the outrageous and obnoxious
behaviour of the MLAs in Andhra Pradesh.

As far as I’m concerned, Qureshi or Akbaruddin
Owaisi (the Hyderabad MLA who led the attack on
Taslima) are no different from Praveen Togadia or
Bal Thackeray. All of them represent the
dangerous politics of intolerance and bigotry.
The fact that some of them have popular support
doesn’t give them legitimacy; it makes them even
more frightening and insidious. And to treat them
differently is to embolden intolerance on either
side.

So, protest peacefully by all means against the
writings of Taslima Nasreen. Let there even be a
genuine debate over whether India should get
entangled in giving her political asylum. After
all, the right to dissent is as sacred as the
right to express. Call her lowbrow, offensive,
inflammatory and an incendiary agent if that’s
what you think she is. But draw the line at both
assault and censorship.

And let’s make sure we tell those who treat human
beings like fatwa fodder that they have no place
in a truly secular society.

* Barkha Dutt is Managing Editor, NDTV 24x7