Time for Taslima Nasrin to finally come back to West Bengal?
The Statesman | 10 May 2026
West Bengal has just turned a page, and it turned it hard. The Trinamool Congress, which had been the face of Bengal politics for over fourteen years, lost power in a manner that left even its fiercest critics momentarily speechless. Suvendu Adhikari of the BJP is the new Chief Minister, and with that comes a set of questions that go beyond roads, jobs, and corruption, questions about what kind of Bengal this new government wants to build. One of those questions has a name: Taslima Nasrin.
The exiled Bangladeshi writer, who has spent the better part of three decades moving between countries, cities, and safehouse addresses, took to Twitter on May 6 to dissect the Bengal election with the kind of candour that has always made her both celebrated and uncomfortable. She talked about accumulated anger, about a party that came promising change and ended up mirroring the arrogance of what it replaced. She talked about corruption woven into the panchayat system, about the teacher recruitment scam, about a cultural world that chose patronage over protest. And, she talked, pointedly, about herself, about how both the Left Front and the Trinamool Congress refused to let her live in the city she calls her second home.
Taslima Nasrin’s relationship with West Bengal is long and complicated. She arrived in Kolkata in 2004, after being driven out of Bangladesh in 1994 by fundamentalist pressure following the publication of ‘Lajja’, her novel about the persecution of Hindus in Bangladesh after the Babri Masjid demolition. The production of her television serial ‘Dusshohobash’ was stopped in West Bengal, and the inauguration of her book ‘Nirbashon’ was cancelled in the state.
Her autobiography, published in West Bengal as ‘Dwikhandita’, faced a ban there under pressure from Indian Muslim activists, with some 3,000 copies seized immediately. The ban remained until 2005.
Then came November 2007. After Muslim groups violently demonstrated on the streets of Kolkata demanding her expulsion, and a Muslim cleric announced a bounty on her head, Indian authorities shifted her to a safehouse in Delhi. She was moved to Jaipur on November 22, 2007, and thereafter to New Delhi. Eventually, she was asked to leave the country, returning only at intervals while waiting for her visa to be renewed.
She had hoped that things would change when Mamata Banerjee came to power in 2011. But she found the Trinamool Congress supremo “harsher” than the Left Front government when it came to her return.
Her May 6 Twitter post was a long reckoning with what Bengal has been and what it failed to become. She wrote about a state that produced Ram Mohan Roy, Vidyasagar, Tagore, and Nazrul, figures who asked whether that tradition of intellectual courage still exists.
Nasrin was particularly sharp about Bengal’s cultural community. She argued that the artists and writers who were once the conscience of society had, in recent years, largely become a class dependent on state patronage, collecting grants and awards and committee seats in exchange for silence or applause.
And she was clear that this was not merely a political observation. “I myself have been a victim of this political culture,” she wrote.
She did not spare the new government from scrutiny either. Her message was that changing governments means nothing if political culture itself does not change. “Otherwise, history will repeat itself once again,” she wrote, “and the people of Bengal will continue to move endlessly in the same circle.”
It is worth noting that the BJP was not silent on Taslima Nasrin before this election. BJP Rajya Sabha MP Samik Bhattacharya had raised the issue of Taslima Nasrin in Parliament. He demanded that she should have the right to return to Kolkata, which she left in 2007 amid widespread protests. “Taslima Nasrin wants to come back to Kolkata. This city is like a city of life to her. She wants to compose her work in Bengali,” Bhattacharya said during a Zero Hour discussion in the Rajya Sabha.
Reacting to Bhattacharya’s remarks, Nasrin expressed gratitude, stating, “I am grateful and thankful to him for realising how important it is for me to live in the Bengali environment of West Bengal if I want to continue writing in Bengali.”
So the BJP had made its sympathy clear, at least rhetorically.
Suvendu Adhikari has just stepped into one of the most politically charged offices in India. The challenges are enormous: law and order, economic recovery, post-election violence, restoring administrative credibility.
Taslima Nasrin is unlikely to be at the top of anyone’s agenda in the first hundred days.
But her case is not a small one. It is, in a sense, a litmus test, not of ideology, but of whether this government means what it has said about freedom of expression and the rights of writers. The BJP spent years in opposition arguing that Mamata Banerjee’s government suppressed voices and appeased one community at the expense of others.
Taslima Nasrin’s continued exile from West Bengal is a living example of exactly that argument.