New Delhi - Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen was brought Friday to New Delhi from Jaipur amid ongoing threats of demonstrations against her by a Muslim organisation. Security personnel again moved Nasreen early in the morning on Friday to Delhi after Jaipur police acted on threats by the city's Muslim organisation All India Milli Council, which threatened to stage demonstrations if the writer was kept in the state for long.
"Freedom does not mean that you can abuse any religion. Nasreen has seriously hurt Muslim sentiments," said Milli state vice president Engineer Mohd Saleem, according to the PTI news agency.
On Thursday, after she was secretly brought from Kolkata in India's eastern state West Bengal, Nasreen was put up in a city hotel in Jaipur, capital of the eastern state Rajasthan, and given protection by 30 police personnel, Rajasthan Inspector General (Security), Meghchand Meena, told PTI.
In a violent protest on Wednesday in Kolkata members of umbrella organization of several small Islamic outfits All-India Minority Forum set up roadblocks in the city and demanded cancellation of 45- year-old Nasreen's visa, which expires on February 17, 2008.
Protestors torched cars, at least 43 people were hurt, more than 100 arrests were made, and soldiers of the Indian army patrolled the streets to control the protest.
"The Kolkata police have advised me to leave the city on grounds of my security, which is why I have come to Jaipur," Nasreen told The Hindu, adding: "I have no place to go. India is my home, and I would like to keep living in this country till I die."
The state secretary Biman Bose of West Bengal's ruling Communist Party of India (Marxist) had said on Wednesday that the author's visa should be cancelled if her presence was causing problems, a statement he backtracked on Thursday saying that only the federal government had the power to deny a visa extension.
The government of India is considering her appeal for Indian citizenship.
CPI(M) is facing political pressure after its cadres violently attacked West Bengal's Nandigram village, which is at the centre of the controversy over land acquisition for corporate ventures, to re- occupy it after members of opposing parties had forcefully taken control of it.
In August Nasreen, who writes in Bengali, the mother-tongue of Bangladesh as well as the people of West Bengal, was attacked by activists of Majlis Ittehadul Muslimeen at a book release function in southern city Hyderabad, upset by her remarks about the Prophet Mohammed and the Koran.
Nasreen, who worked as a government physician in Bangladesh, first came under attack in 1993 after she made critical comments about the treatment of women under Islam in her newspaper columns - after which Islamic fundamentalists issued a fatwa and offered a bounty for her death.
The release of her novella Lajja (Shame) in 1993, which drew attention to the state-sponsored persecution and dwindling numbers of the Hindu minority in Bangladesh, further angered conservative Muslims, and her passport was confiscated by the government.
In 1994, Islamic fundamentalists raised the pitch after she was quoted in the Indian newspaper The Statesman as saying that "the Koran should be revised thoroughly."
Threats to her life forced Nasreen to move out of Bangladesh and she went to live in Europe, from where she shifted in Kolkata from 2004 onwards.
In March 2007, the All India Ittehad Millat Council based in India's northern state Uttar Pradesh offered a bounty of 12,651 dollars for her beheading.
