Taslima Nasreen asks Mamata Banejee to learn from Chidambaram

Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen on Sunday advised West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banejee to “learn” from Congress leader P. Chidambaram and admit it was “wrong” to stop broadcast of a TV serial scripted by her after fundamentalists objected to it.

“Mamata Di should learn from Chidambaram and say banning Taslima’s TV drama series is wrong. She should lift the ban and let the TV telecast the series,” Nasreen said in a tweet, according to news agency PTI which added that the broadcast of the author’s serial about a family settled in Kolkata was stopped on the then newly launched “Aakash Aath” channel in December, 2013.

Nasreen had then blamed the West Bengal government for supporting fundamentalists belonging to a certain community and tweeted that she felt she was living in Saudi Arabia. The remarks of the writer, living in exile in India, came a day after Chidambaram admitted that banning of Salman Rushdie’s novel Satanic Verses by the Rajiv Gandhi government in 1988 was “wrong”.

Nasreen, who drew the ire of fundamentalists for her controversial books like Lajja and Dwikhandito tweeted, “P. Chidambaram said the decision to ban Satanic Verses was wrong. When would B. Bhattacharya say banning my book Dwik-handito was wrong ”. Communist leader Budd-hadeb Bhattacharya is a former CMof West Bengal.

Exiled from Bangladesh in 1994 for allegedly hurting religious sentiments with her novel Lajja, the doctor-turned-author had taken refuge in Kolkata in 2004, after a long stay in Europe. After violent protests in Kolkata in November 2007, the government sheltered her in New Delhi where she has been living since then.