Taslima Nasreen attacked Indian writers, many of whom are not returning their awards, of ‘double standards’ and said nobody defended her when she was hounded of Kolkata by Islamist radicals.In an interview to the ‘Times of India’, Taslima said many writers who are now vocal against murders of writers and rising extremism of Hindu groups were silent when she was forced to leave Kolkata.”When five Fatwas were issued against me in India, when I was thrown out of West Bengal, when I was kept under house arrest in Delhi for months and forced to leave India, when my mega serial was banned, most writers were silent,” Taslima said.”Not only were they silent, but famous writers like Sunil Ganguly and Shankha Ghosh appealed to then chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya to ban my book.”But Taslima did not believe the return of awards by many writers in recent weeks to protest murders of rationalists by Hindu extremists and the lynching of a Muslim man in Dadri were ‘part of a plan.'”There’s nothing wrong in it. Somebody gets an idea, others like it.”Taslima, however, said that intolerance was rising in India, though minorities here were far safer than in Pakistan and Bangladesh.”If Muslims were brutally persecuted in India, they would have left the country in large numbers for neighbouring Muslim countries like Hindus have been leaving Pakistan and Bangladesh.”
Taslima said that most writers in India have double standards.”They attack Hindu fundamentalists in strongest terms but defend the most heinous crimes of Muslim fundamentalists.”Taslima’s attack against Indian writers came on a day many more cultural personalities like dancer Mallika Sarabhai lashed out at the RSS-BJP combine for ‘Talibanising the country’ and for what they described as ‘ruining the country’s pluralist ethos’.Mallika is daughter of India’s renowned space scientist Vikram Sarabhai and famous dancer Mrinalini Sarabhai.
