Nasreen is distraught at not being able to meet French President Sarkozy when he arrives here this week and accept the prestigious Simone de Beauvoir award.
KOLKATA: Confined to an undisclosed 'safe house' in New Delhi, Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen is distraught at not being able to meet French President Nicolas Sarkozy when he arrives here this week and accept the prestigious Simone de Beauvoir award from him in public.
The French government had conferred the award on her recently, and Nasreen is very keen that Sarkozy hands it to her personally during his visit to India beginning Friday. She said the president wanted it too.
"I was contacted by the French government last night (Monday) and they told me that the French president would like to hand me the award. But I learnt from a report in a Bengali daily that I perhaps would not be able to receive it in public," Nasreen told on Tuesday.
"I really want to receive the award from the French president. I attach a lot of value to this award," a distressed Nasreen said.
"I don't think there is any reason for me to remain in confinement like this. My security can be beefed up if the Indian government thinks so but there is no justification in keeping me confined to a room and not allowing to meet anybody," said the controversial author, who had to leave Kolkata in November following street riots against her.
She said she still wanted to return to Kolkata.
Although there is a campaign to bring the crusader back to Kolkata, her adopted home, the Indian government has so far remained unmoved.
Magasaysay Award winner Mahasweta Devi has urged Hindi and other vernacular language writers to campaign for the Bangladeshi author's freedom so that she can return.
The 45-year-old Nasreen said, "I am only breathing. I don't think I am alive like you are. Can anybody live like this? It was beyond my imagination that in a secular democracy like India, such a thing could happen to a writer."
In a delicate balancing act, External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee has promised to "shelter" Nasreen, but urged her to "refrain from activities and expressions" that may hurt the sentiments of Indian people and harm relations with friendly countries.
His party colleague and union Information and Broadcasting Minister Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi has asked Nasreen to apologise to the Muslims with folded hands for her writings.
On Nov 30, 2007, Nasreen had agreed to expunge controversial portions from her biography 'Dwikhandita' (Split in Two).
Although patriarch of the state's ruling Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) Jyoti Basu had said Dec 25 that Nasreen was welcome to return to Kolkata, the Left Front government has chosen to remain silent on her plight, keeping Muslim sentiments in mind.
Nasreen's most recent award is named after Simone de Beauvoir, the noted French philosopher, novelist, essayist and feminist whose two-volume treatise "Le deuxième sexe" or "The Second Sex" published in 1949 took the world by storm.
"When we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the 'division' of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form," de Beauvoir once wrote.
In 2008, a woman writer like Taslima Nasreen is all set to become a living embodiment of that "slavery of half the humanity", human rights activists here feel.
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