Taslima Nasreen has been allowed to return — for how long is anybody’s guess. There has been much debate on the primary issue at stake — an individual’s freedom of speech. She keeps company with other free-speech martyrs of independent India — Salman Rushdie who offended Muslim sensibilities, M.F. Hussain whose paintings hurt Hindu sentiments, Kumar Ketkar who criticized the building of Shivaji’s statue, Dan Brown of The Da Vinci Code which offended Christians, the Dera Sacha Sauda chief Gurmeet Singh who annoyed Sikhs, Kerala textbooks that ‘glorified’ atheism and therefore offended all religious groups — the list is endless. But I want to discuss another, less remarked aspect of Taslima’s story — India’s failure to protect a refugee, in gross disregard of not only international law but also its own ancient tradition of providing refuge to the sharanaarthi.

Indian law offers very weak, if any, legal protection to refugees. There are several categories of residents in a country — citizens, permanent residents, economic migrants, foreign visitors and refugees, with varying legal rights. The Foreigners Act of 1946 makes no distinction between a foreigner and a refugee. Its preamble provides ‘for the exercise by the Central government of certain powers in respect of the entry of foreigners into India, their presence therein and their departure therefrom’. The Act effectively provides the Central government with complete discretion in its dealings with all foreigners; with an important caveat supplied by the Supreme Court in its judgment in National Human Rights Commission vs. Arunachal Pradesh (1996) — under Article 21 of the Constitution ‘... the State is bound to protect the life and liberty of every human being, be he a citizen or otherwise — ‘ Therefore, even as a mere foreigner, the state is obliged to provide security to Taslima as long as she is within the country. But does she have a right to stay in India?

... contd.