NEW DELHI, April 16: Visiting radical activist and exiled Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen on Monday added a new dimension to a recent controversy surrounding her country’s independence in 1971, saying it had little to do with India’s role and was more a response to oppression of her people by West Pakistan.

Press Trust of India, reporting from Bhopal, quoted Ms Nasreen as effectively rebuffing Saturday’s remarks by Congress MP Rahul Gandhi that his family had planned the division of Pakistan, thereby creating Bangladesh.

“Nobody can decide to divide a country. It was a result of an internal people’s movement that resulted due to oppression of East Pakistan residents by West Pakistan lords,” Ms Nasreen told reporters in Bhopal.

She also condemned a fatwa issued against Pakistan’s Tourism Minister Nilofer Bakhtiyar for reportedly embracing a male during a paragliding event in Paris, PTI said.

Hoping that “true democracy” would return to Bangladesh, she said though it was the ultimate answer to people’s woes, elections could be “managed by fundamentalist forces” with money and muscle power as people were poor and ignorant.

Ms Nasreen, a citizen of Sweden, said she did not like to live in that country as she felt that she was an “outsider”.