Where are the voices?

For months now the acclaimed Bangladeshi authoress Taslima Nasreen has been trying to get Indian citizenship and so far has gotten no positive response from the Indian government. In an article (the website, sadly, doesn’t like the Mozilla browser) in the Hindi newspaper Denik Jagran, Balbir Punj of the BJP has rightly asked what sort of a secularism is it? Although he is a Jansanghi pseudo-intellectual and has his own political agenda in raking up the issue, he has a point.

This reminds me, where’s the writers’ lobby? Where are the crusaders who cry horse over the human rights issues? Is everybody taciturn because Ms. Tasleem is not liked by the Muslims and anything anti-Muslim is not politically correct in the current socio-political scenario? Some prominent activists were conspicuous in the capital recently when a Muslim professor was allegedly targeted by the State.

Well, this is not a question of being pro-Muslim or anti-Muslim: whatever is right is right, whatever is wrong is wrong. It’s a shame that the so-called intellectuals in the country have failed to rise to the occasion.