Bengal vandalism row: Taslima Nasrin revives debate on Communist-era book bans, writer repression

New Delhi: Bangladesh-origin, Swedish author-activist Taslima Nasrin highlighting history of ban, banishment, and repression been carried out by Communists globally has drawn mixed reactions across party lines when clips showing Left Front's book stalls being vandalised in West Bengal during the recently concluded Durga Puja celebration are being widely circulated.

"Banning books, burning books, silencing writers -- isn't that in the history of Communists? It is," she emphasised.

"Sometimes it's a party attack, sometimes a government ban, sometimes sending writers to labour camps, sometimes forcing them into exile. We need to keep track of that with the names of the country, party, rulers, and time. The list below isn't complete, but there's documentation for each incident," she added, writing in Bengali on a Facebook post on Friday.

The Opposition in West Bengal has held the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) responsible for the attacks, even as many among the ruling party's state leadership have joined voices in condemning the act.

Included in the sixth place on her list was "Taslima Nasrin's Controversial Work", where she wrote: "The Left Front government led by the then Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee in West Bengal banned and confiscated the book, citing offence to religious sentiments."

Adding that "According to court records, the first government notification was dated November 27, 2003.

Later, a new notification was issued on April 30, 2004.

On September 22, 2005, the Calcutta High Court lifted the ban, the controversial writer alleged, "On November 21, 2007, CPI-M's State Secretary Biman Basu said that if Taslima Nasrin's presence creates peace issues, she should leave the state. On November 22, she was expelled from the state."

Taslima began with names like the Russian Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was forced to spend eight years in prisons and labour camps, followed by three more years in enforced exile for having criticised Joseph Stalin.

Among other notable names in her list, those incarcerated for questioning the erstwhile Soviet empire or its leaders were Varlam Shalamov, Osip Mandelstam, Yevgenia Ginzburg, among others.

She also mentioned specific works that were subjected to scrutiny, ban, or suppression like Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We", Boris Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago", and others.

Alleging that Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel were tried for "anti-Soviet" activities over publishing satirical literature, and sentenced to years of forced labour, Taslima stressed, "This happened long after Stalin's death. The State's oppression of writers did not stop just because Stalin was gone."

Czech writer Milan Kundera's books also featured in her list where she described the ban, his losing job, and "had to remain under police surveillance" after the Soviet-led military invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968", adding, "In 1975, he moved to France."

She mentioned Václav Havel's works, where, "Under the Communist rule of Czechoslovakia, the legal publication and staging of his play 'The Conspirators' was blocked. In 1971, his works were banned in schools and government libraries."

Taslima then wrote about Jung Chang, who "wrote China's history through the lives of three generations of women in her family. The terrifying experiences of Mao's rule and the Cultural Revolution are in that book", mentioning that "Wild Swans is banned in mainland China. The author's own website also has information about the ban".

In Vietnam, Taslima added, Duong Thu Huong's "Paradise of the Blind" among her novels were "effectively banned" under Communist rule, and "expelled from the party for speaking up in favour of human rights and democratic reform. In 1991, she was imprisoned without trial," the controversial author wrote.

"It's not that she got the right to criticise because she was once involved with the Communist movement," Taslima said.

In Cuba, poet Heberto Padilla's poetry collection was awarded in 1968, but "the leadership of the organisation added a criticism calling the book 'counter-revolutionary'," Taslima emphasised.

Similarly, Liu Xiaobo, who she pointed "played a key role in creating Charter 08, a manifesto for human rights and political reform in China", was arrested and "in 2009 was sentenced to eleven years in prison".

Towards the end, the noted feminist mentioned about "Book burning during China's Cultural Revolution" where "From 1966, Mao-supported Red Guards burned books and libraries in a campaign to destroy old culture", and "Book burning by a section of the Maoists in West Bengal" around 1970-71.

She later referred to alleged attempts at destroying books and libraries in West Bengal and in erstwhile USSR, the "Orders to cut pages from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia" after Lavrentiy Beria was removed from power and executed.

"This was not a street-level book-ripping movement. It was an instance of erasing history from books published under state orders," Taslima contended.

"Protesting book burning, bans, or imprisoning or exiling writers shouldn't depend on party colours. You don't defend freedom of speech by demanding freedom for the books you like and censorship for the ones you don't," she stressed.

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