NEW DELH: Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen has been on the run from extremists threatening to kill her ever since she started writing books that incensed religious hardliners.

On Friday, Nasreen was being bundled from place to place in an all-enveloping black burqa as Indian authorities sought a safe haven for her, following violent protests calling for her expulsion.

Nasreen fled Bangladesh in 1994 after huge street protests by demonstrators who decried her writings as blasphemous and demanded her ‘execution’. Now the 45-year-old gynaecologist-turned author who describes herself as a humanist says all she wants to do is stay in India but has “no place to go”.

The latest events had pushed her to the brink of collapse.

“I am mentally distressed. I am not well at all,” Nasreen said on Friday.

The overtly atheist Nasreen, whose website proclaims “I don’t believe in God,” stayed for some years in Europe and the United States after leaving Bangladesh.

But she had made her home in Kolkata in communist-ruled West Bengal state since 2004 in an apartment, kept company by a cat she found at a fish market and guarded by Indian security forces.

The Bengali-speaking eastern Indian state borders Bangladesh and is — she says — “closest to what I know as home.”

“I am a Bengali writer and I would like to live on in surroundings imbued by Bengali culture,” Nasreen, author of 28 books of poetry, novels and other works in her native language Bengali, told Indian media in 2005.

It was unclear on Friday where Nasreen would go amid unconfirmed media reports she was travelling to New Delhi.

She has been seeking permanent residence in officially secular India.

But so far, the government has only granted her six-month visa extensions, fearful of upsetting the country’s 140 million-plus Muslims. Media reports said New Delhi has extended her Indian visa, which was due to expire in February 2008.

In New Delhi, Muslim group, All India Milli Council, said on Friday all Muslim organisations would “vehemently protest” her stay as she has “hurt the sentiments of millions of Muslims in the country.”

Extremists have been baying for Nasreen’s execution ever since she wrote her debut novel ‘Lajja’ or ‘Shame’ in 1994 depicting alleged violence against minority Hindus by ‘Muslim fundamentalists’ in Bangladesh.

The outspoken feminist has also stirred anger with trenchant descriptions of the oppression of women in male-dominated Bangladesh, calling religion and patriarchy “the causes of women’s suffering”.

Her presence in India has provoked relentless controversy.

—AFP