On July 31, after nearly 19 years, Taslima Nasrin returned to Kolkata. The following day, she appeared at an anti-fundamentalism programme at Rabindra Sadan, where West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari joined the welcome and promised her security whenever she visited the state.

The scene invited an obvious comparison. The Left Front, long associated with secular politics in India, had failed to keep an atheist and feminist writer in Kolkata. The BJP government now offered her protection.

Yet Nasrin’s history in Bengal raises a more enduring question. Her case shows how governments decide which controversial voices they are prepared to protect, which become inconvenient, and which later acquire political value. Protection begins to look less like an impersonal right and more like a politically allocated resource.

When the Writer Became the Problem

In 2003, West Bengal’s Left Front government banned Nasrin’s autobiographical book Dwikhandito, saying it could hurt religious sentiments. The Calcutta High Court overturned the ban in 2005.

Two years later came the more consequential exclusion.

The violence in Kolkata in November 2007 involved protests against Nasrin as well as anger over the killings in Nandigram. Nasrin’s removal was one concrete outcome. Faced with organised threats and street violence, the government moved the threatened writer out of the city.

The episode revealed a familiar administrative instinct. Once somebody’s presence is classified as a law-and-order problem, removing that person can appear easier than confronting those making the threats. The state does not have to formally censor the writer. It can simply make continued presence too difficult.

When Organised Anger Became a Veto

Nasrin's removal gave organised anger a kind of informal veto. Her opponents did not need to win a legal argument against her writing. They only needed to raise the political and security cost of allowing her to remain.

The Trinamool Congress government never fundamentally reversed that situation. Nasrin remained effectively outside Kolkata during Mamata Banerjee’s years in office. In 2014, she complained that a book launch had been cancelled and that a television drama scripted by her had been prevented from being broadcast.

Whether every such decision originated directly from the government is beside the larger point. Cultural institutions could see that accommodating Nasrin might create trouble, while excluding her carried little cost.

Under the Left, she became expendable. Under Trinamool, she remained inconvenient.

A Homecoming No Party Should Own

The security now offered to Nasrin matters. After almost two decades away, her ability to return to Kolkata, appear publicly and contemplate living there again should not be dismissed simply because the BJP may benefit from the symbolism.

She has faced genuine threats. Protecting her is a responsibility of the government.

The politics surrounding the homecoming, however, are harder to ignore. Nasrin’s return fits comfortably into a BJP narrative about previous governments capitulating to Muslim fundamentalists while a new political order restores freedoms they abandoned.

There is truth in the failures that the narrative points to. But it can also reduce Nasrin to a useful political character: a victim of Muslim fundamentalism rescued by a Hindu nationalist government.

Nasrin has resisted that role herself. Before travelling, she emphasised that secular and human-rights groups had organised the event, not the BJP. Government security, she argued, was simply what an elected administration should provide.

At the Kolkata programme, she put the point more sharply: “Gratitude is not a contract of loyalty.” She had not, she said, mortgaged her independent thinking in exchange for protection.

That distinction matters because a political gift creates an expectation of gratitude. A right should not.

The Boundary Inside the Celebration

The programme itself offered an unexpected illustration. When Nasrin invited poet Joy Goswami to join her on stage, a section of the audience objected. Goswami rose from his seat but had to turn back. The resentment reportedly reflected his perceived proximity to former chief minister Mamata Banerjee and accusations that he had remained silent during Nasrin’s exile, although he had previously expressed regret for not doing enough when she was driven out.

A gathering celebrating a writer’s freedom had begun deciding whether another writer was morally qualified to share the stage with her.

Nasrin had crossed back over one boundary of political acceptability. Another boundary appeared almost immediately around someone regarded as insufficiently loyal.

The episode is revealing because selective tolerance does not always require censorship by the state. Political communities can reproduce the same habit themselves, sorting public figures into those entitled to recognition and those who have forfeited it.

Parallel and Contrast Across the Border

Bangladesh offers a parallel. At the 2025 Amar Ekushey Book Fair in Dhaka, a crowd surrounded the Sabyasachi Prokashoni stall over the display of Nasrin’s books. Police intervened, but their immediate response included detaining someone from the stall and covering it with tarpaulin. Then Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus later condemned the attack.

The instinct was familiar: controlling the vulnerable speaker or publisher was easier than confronting the crowd threatening disorder.

There is also a striking contrast within West Bengal today. The same BJP government welcoming a prominent Bangladeshi-born writer has instructed police and railway authorities to identify and deport people it calls “Bangladeshi infiltrators.”

Nasrin, unlike those being labelled infiltrators, holds a valid long-term residence permit. The contrast is therefore not a legal equivalence. It is revealing for another reason.

People arriving from the same side of a border can be assigned radically different political meanings. One becomes a Bengali intellectual, dissident and symbol of refuge. Another becomes an infiltrator. The categories are produced not only by documents and nationality, but by the political stories into which individuals can be placed.

Taslima Nasrin’s homecoming deserves to be welcomed. A writer should be able to return to a city she considers home without fearing violence. The harder test will come when the symbolism fades. Will the government protect her if her criticism becomes inconvenient to the people now celebrating her return?

That is a more meaningful measure of secularism than the public embrace of a dissident whose story embarrasses one’s opponents. Freedom becomes secure only when governments defend people whose protection brings them no political reward, and sometimes carries a political cost.

(The author is sociologist and researcher on Islam, secularism and post-colonial identity in South Asia currently based in Türkiye. The views expressed are personal. He can be contacted at wayejkuruni@gmail.com/ [LinkedIn]  )