Taslima Nasreen told NDTV that returning to Kolkata felt like returning to her own country. That sentence carries more weight than she perhaps intended — because, legally speaking, Kolkata is not her country at all. She is a Bangladeshi national, resident in India on a permit that the executive renews at its discretion, with no statute behind it and no court she could approach as of right if that discretion were withdrawn tomorrow.
Nasreen left Dhaka under death threats after Islamist groups demanded her execution for her writing in the early 1990s. She made Kolkata her home through the late 1990s and into the 2000s — a city whose literary culture, Bangla street-signs, adda traditions, and book-fair crowds made the exile feel like something other than exile. Then, in 2007, the West Bengal government under Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya facilitated her removal from the city following massive street protests over her memoir Dwikhandito. She has lived in Delhi since.
Her return in 2026, described in that single line to NDTV — feels like I'm back to my country — should be read not as a closing chapter but as an opening argument. The argument is this: India's instinct toward subcontinental dissidents is generous and rooted in its civilisational self-conception, but the institutional architecture that should protect that instinct barely exists.
The Expulsion Nobody Formally Ordered
What happened to Nasreen in 2007 was remarkable precisely because no one issued a formal deportation order. The West Bengal government did not declare her unwelcome in writing. The Centre did not revoke a visa. Instead, she was moved first to an undisclosed location, then to Delhi, then effectively kept away from Kolkata through a combination of political signals and bureaucratic non-cooperation. The absence of a formal order meant there was no formal order to challenge in court.
Her continued presence in India through nearly two decades rests on a residency permit that the Ministry of Home Affairs renews periodically. The Ministry of External Affairs has issued no formal statement acknowledging her Kolkata return. The silence is deliberate — India has maintained this ambiguity to avoid diplomatic friction with Dhaka, where her books remain banned and her name remains politically toxic.
That ambiguity served a purpose when India-Bangladesh relations were in one configuration. But Bangladesh's political landscape shifted dramatically through 2024, and India is now recalibrating its relationship with Dhaka following that transition. The high-profile return of South Asia's most famous exiled writer to the city she calls home will be noticed in Dhaka. The question is whether India has thought through what its response will be — and whether that response will be principled or merely tactical.
Sanctuary Without Statute
India has no refugee law. This is not a controversial claim — it is a structural fact. India is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention. The country manages the presence of refugees, asylum seekers, and persecuted writers like Nasreen through a patchwork of administrative instruments: the Foreigners Act, executive orders, residency permits, and ultimately political will. In practice, this means India's sanctuary is real but revocable — generous in one government's reading, withdrawn in another's.
The Nasreen case is perhaps the clearest illustration of how that revocability works at the state level. The 2007 decision was not made in Delhi — it was made in Kolkata, by a state government calculating the electoral costs of defending a Bangladeshi writer against street protests by Muslim voters whose support the Left Front needed. The Centre acquiesced. Constitutional protections for free expression, which would apply to any Indian citizen in comparable circumstances, did not extend to Nasreen because no statute made them applicable to her situation.
That gap — between India's civilisational self-image as a place of shelter and the legal vacuum that makes that shelter contingent — is the structural fault line her return exposes. Ramachandra Guha has previously described India's treatment of Nasreen as a failure of liberal nerve, an instance where democratic institutions capitulated to street-level intimidation. That diagnosis was accurate in 2007. What has changed since is not the law — it is, at best, the political weather.
The Soft Power Argument Has a Hard Legal Counterpart
There is a case to be made — and India's strategic thinkers at institutions like the Observer Research Foundation have made versions of it in South Asia briefs — that India's willingness to shelter dissidents from across the subcontinent is itself a form of soft power. A Bangladesh that persecutes its writers, a Pakistan that exiles its poets, a Myanmar that imprisons its journalists: against that backdrop, India's record of providing refuge, however imperfect, signals something about the kind of civilisational state it aspires to be.
Nasreen's return to Kolkata amplifies that signal. She said herself that the city feels like home — that the Bangla she thinks in and writes in, the cultural grammar of the city, makes the border between her Bangladesh and India's Bengal feel like an administrative accident rather than an existential fact. India can choose to lean into that framing. Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam — the world as one family — is not merely a slogan for foreign policy speeches. It describes something real about how the subcontinent's Bengali-speaking intelligentsia has always moved across the Bengal delta's partition.
But soft power built on administrative discretion can be withdrawn the next time a state election makes it inconvenient. For the civilisational argument to hold, it needs institutional reinforcement. A codified asylum or refugee protection framework — one that extends to persecuted writers and intellectuals the kind of procedural guarantees that Indian citizens enjoy — would convert India's generous instinct into a durable commitment. It would also make India's regional human-rights leadership something other than a claim it makes only when the diplomatic winds are favourable.
The Kolkata Literary World's Divided Ledger
Nasreen's return will not be uniformly celebrated in Kolkata's literary circles. The Bangla Academy community has long been divided — her work, particularly Dwikhandito, strikes many readers as deliberately incendiary toward Muslim religious practice rather than purely a defence of liberal values. That division is itself significant: it reflects the difficulty of separating the question of whether someone has the right to write from the question of whether what they write is wise or fair.
Democratic theory has an answer to that difficulty, and the answer is not complicated: the right to write precedes the debate about the writing. India's Constitution agrees. What India's institutional apparatus has never managed to do is operationalise that agreement when the writer in question is a foreigner, the offended community is an electoral constituency, and the state government in question is calculating votes rather than principles.
Nasreen feels she is back in her country. The more demanding question — the one her return deposits on India's institutional doorstep — is whether India has built the legal architecture to ensure that feeling is not revoked the next time the political weather changes in West Bengal or in Dhaka. A residency permit renewed at executive discretion is not a guarantee. India's claim to civilisational sanctuary requires something more durable.
