Looking back on the events in Kolkata over the last week, one may be forgiven for thinking that we had stepped right through Alice’s looking glass into her topsy-turvy wonderland. A writer, sitting in her home and minding her own business, suddenly becomes the focus of out and out criminal activity on the city streets, ostensibly because of some connection to the goings-on in Nandigram — but nobody quite knows what. To the best of my knowledge, she hasn’t opened her mouth on that issue, in fact she has been remarkably low-key for several months now, having earlier been the direct target of a similar criminal attack on her in Hyderabad. Taslima Nasreen, it seems, cannot do anything right, not even if it means doing nothing.

Her attackers, on the other hand, are deemed to be in the ‘right’, even though they have broken the law, damaged public property, caused grievous losses and wilfully acted against the public good. They remain free to spring yet more violence on the public while Taslima is unceremoniously shunted out of the city because she’s a ‘threat’ to public security and peace.