July 29, 2003	Tuesday	Jumadi-ul-Awwal 28, 1424

KOLKATA, July 28: Award-winning Bengali-language writer Samaresh Majumdar said on Monday he had been denied a visa to visit Bangladesh because he wrote a novel in which he claimed Indian separatists have set up bases in the country.

Majumdar, whose novel, “Eto Rokto Keno” (“Bloodshed, Why?”), centres on the abduction of a Bengali doctor by separatist guerillas, said he had been hoping to leave for Dhaka on Monday at the invitation of a writers’ forum in Bangladesh.

In the book, he alleges that the separatists are operating from camps set up in Bangladesh.—AFP