The manner in which Taslima Nasreen has had to be shunted from city to city over the last few days is a matter of shame. It reveals a clear unwillingness or incapacity on the part of the state to protect freedom of speech and expression. Both the CPM-led Left government in West Bengal and the UPA government at the Centre have shown themselves to be weak-kneed in the face of mob unruliness.

It is the BJP that has emerged as Nasreen’s unexpected champion, offering her shelter in Rajasthan, demanding that she be declared as a political refugee. Even by India’s low standards of political morality, the BJP’s stand is astoundingly hypocritical, given the record of the party and its ideological mates in leading violent campaigns on grounds of social or religious disagreement.

The BJP’s pro-Nasreen stand is no evidence of a volte-face on the issue of artistic freedom — which, even as a ruse, would sit oddly with its and its sister organisation, the VHP’s, shenanigans at the Baroda School of Art this May or its virulent campaign against M.F. Husain. This is perhaps why the party is demanding that Nasreen be treated as a ‘political’ refugee, regardless of the fact that the opposition she represents is social rather than political.

The BJP’s unexpected show of solidarity with the beleaguered Bangladeshi writer is aimed more at showing up what it believes is the hypocrisy of its political and ideological opponents: Hindutvawadis having long held that Indians who believe in secularism, especially Communists, ‘favour’ Muslims over Hindus. It is testimony to the dogged persistence with which the BJP has made its case over decades and partly to the changing environment in the world in the wake of increasing incidents of Islamic terrorism that its argument has been finding favour even among the more liberal sections of society. The argument gaining ground goes that Muslim fundamentalism being as bad as Hindu fundamentalism, the right to criticise both should be fervently protected.

... contd.