The left-liberal media ecosystem in India has perfected a singular art form over the decades: the mental gymnastics required to sanitise Islamic fundamentalism while finding a way to blame Hindus for the resulting chaos. No matter how egregious the display of radicalism, no matter how clear the identity of the perpetrators, the habitual apologists at publications like The Indian Express will unfailingly bend over backwards to spin the narrative. Their latest attempt to obfuscate reality comes wrapped in an analysis of exiled Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen’s return to West Bengal.
Titled ‘In Taslima Nasrin’s return to West Bengal, two stories of religious majoritarianism’, the piece is a masterclass in pseudo-intellectual dishonesty. It reveals the sheer desperation of a media apparatus that cannot bring itself to name Islamic bigotry without immediately inventing a false equivalence to vilify Hindus.
The reality of 2007: Islamic violence forced Nasreen out
To understand the absurdity of the Indian Express piece, one must first revisit why Taslima Nasreen had to flee Kolkata in 2007. She was not driven out by abstract concepts or nameless phantoms. She was forced out because radical Islamic mobs took to the streets of Kolkata, rioting, damaging property, and baying for her blood over her writings, particularly her novel Lajja and Dwikhandito, books which documented the persecution of minority Hindus in Bangladesh by the Muslim majority.
Faced with violent street power from Islamist groups like the All India Minority Forum, the Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee-led Left Front government chose cowardice. Rather than upholding law and order and defending free speech, the state capitulated completely, effectively hounding Nasreen out of Bengal to appease a fundamentalist vote bank. Subsequent years under the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress saw no change in stance; appeasement remained the ruling ideology, and Nasreen remained persona non grata in the city she called home.
The twisted logic: Welcome an exiled author, get accused of a ‘sinister plot’
Fast forward to her return. When an exiled feminist writer, who faced death threats from Islamic extremists for decades, finally gets to return to Kolkata under an administration willing to guarantee her security, one would expect commentators concerned with human rights and free expression to welcome the move. Instead, The Indian Express views the welcome extended to her not as a victory for free speech, but as a sinister plot by “Hindu nationalists.”
The article laments that billboards were put up, conch shells were blown, and her arrival was hailed as a “ghar wapsi” or a return of confidence. To the left-liberal mind, welcoming a persecuted dissident with traditional Indian customs is apparently an act of provocation. The piece goes on to claim that providing security to Nasreen is a “double-edged sword” because it allows the BJP to essentialise and vilify Muslim culture and politics as anti-women and regressive.
Consider the sheer inversion of cause and effect in this logic. First, radical Islamists issue death threats and violently drive a female writer out of a state. Then, political parties capitulate to these extremists for decades to secure vote banks. Finally, when a government provides her safety and calls out the radicalism that drove her away, that government is accused of “vilifying” Muslims.
According to this convoluted worldview, pointing out the documented actions of Islamic fundamentalists is worse than the fundamentalism itself. The perpetrators of violence are shielded from criticism, while those providing refuge to the victim are painted as the true villains.
The dog-whistle of “majoritarianism”
The centrepiece of the article’s intellectual sleight of hand is the deployment of the word “majoritarianism.” By titling the piece “two stories of religious majoritarianism,” the author attempts to draw a moral symmetry between two vastly different phenomena. On one hand, you have Islamic fundamentalism driving mobs to riot on the streets, issue fatwas, and demand the expulsion or death of a writer for expressing her views. On the other hand, you have what the author frames as “Hindu majoritarianism,” consisting of citizens blowing conch shells, putting up welcome banners, and guaranteeing the physical safety of that same writer.
To equate the violent intolerance that exiled Taslima Nasreen with the cultural welcome that facilitated her return is not just bad analysis—it is deliberate propaganda.
The term “majoritarianism” has become a favourite dog-whistle for the Left media and its ideologues. It is deployed specifically to defame the Hindu majority whenever they assert their cultural identity or challenge the entrenched system of selective secularism. In the vocabulary of the left-liberal establishment, any policy or action that protects victims of Islamist aggression is reflexively branded as “majoritarian,” thereby turning the concept of justice upside down.
Secular humanism as a shield for appeasement
The article concludes by invoking Nasreen’s call for “secular humanism” and her criticism of all organised religions, attempting to weaponise her philosophical stance against the very people offering her refuge. It lectures the reader that her visit is not a story of party politics, but the tale of the return of the writer-activist who stands against religious fundamentalism and majoritarian politics.
This is the ultimate irony. For decades, self-proclaimed “secularists” in India ignored Nasreen’s plight, turned a blind eye to the fatwas against her, and allowed fundamentalists to dictate state policy. They discarded “secular humanism” the moment it conflicted with electoral arithmetic. Now that her return highlights the utter failure of their favoured political models, these same commentators retreat into high-minded abstractions about “humanism” to avoid confronting the specific, real-world source of her persecution.
The Left’s primary objective: Fiction over facts, propaganda over reality
The Indian Express article is a textbook illustration of why mainstream media commentary has lost credibility among observant readers. It demonstrates an ideological framework where Muslims must always be framed as potential victims, even when the context is the return of a woman fleeing Islamist death threats, and Hindus must always be cast as aggressors, even when blowing conch shells to welcome a persecuted author.
Taslima Nasreen’s return to Kolkata should have been a straightforward story about the triumph of free expression over violent intolerance. By converting it into a narrative about the dangers of “Hindu majoritarianism,” the left-liberal media once again proves that its primary commitment is not to truth, justice, or free speech, but to the defence of a broken, one-sided narrative at all costs.
