Controversial Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, who is in hiding in India after protests by Muslims, must apologize for her anti-Islamic writings, a prominent Indian Muslim cleric said Monday.
The 45-year-old writer, who fled Bangladesh in 1994, is currently living in an undisclosed location near New Delhi after being forced to leave the eastern Indian city of Kolkata last month following violent protests.
Indian Muslims will not tolerate the infamous authoress Taslima Nasreen on the Indian soil unless she apologized, Syed Ahmed Bukhari, chief cleric of New Delhi s 17th-century Jama Masjid mosque, said in a statement.
India is a democratic nation and the constitution here neither does permit any citizen nor allow any foreign national to be irreverent to the tenets of any religion, the cleric said.
The entire responsibility of the consequences shall rest upon the government of India, Bukhari warned.
The Indian government has pledged to protect Nasreen and moved her to a safe house in New Delhi last month after the protests.
Nasreen said Friday that she would remove controversial passages from her autobiography Dikhandito (Split into Two).
But Muslim leaders in Kolkata warned they would keep up their protests if Nasreen returned to the city.
She wants to remove the controversial paragraphs to return to the city. No one knows what she will write in her next book, said Siddikulla Chowdhury, convenor of Milli Ittehad Parishad, an umbrella alliance of 12 Muslim groups. The West Bengal state, where Kolkata is located, had banned Dikhandito in 2003 after protests by Muslims, but a court lifted the ban in 2005.
Nasreen said the controversial autobiographical passages were based on her memories of Bangladesh in the 1980s when secular constitutional guarantees were under attack.
Nasreen fled her homeland after being accused of blasphemy for her 1994 novel Lajja (Shame), which depicts violence against minority Hindus by Muslims in Muslim-majority Bangladesh.
The writer – who has received death threats for her work – has lived in Kolkata since 2004, after spending time in Europe and the United States.
She holds a Swedish passport but has been seeking permanent residence in Hindu-majority, but officially secular, India.
So far the government, fearful of angering the nation s 140-million Muslims, has only granted her six-month visa extensions. -AFP
