Taslima Nasrin’s Return, ‘Lajja’ and the Free-Speech Debate

CURRENT AFFAIRS | 16 JULY 2026

An invitation to Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin to return to Kolkata after nearly two decades has reopened a familiar debate in India — how far the freedom of speech and expression can be squeezed by protest, outrage and pre-emptive censorship.

Nasrin was effectively driven out of Kolkata years ago amid street protests, long after the furore over her 1993 novel ‘Lajja’ and her exile from Bangladesh. Her possible return has been welcomed by writers as a corrective, but it also throws light on how governments and institutions have repeatedly responded to anger against authors and artists — not by protecting them, but by withdrawing books, cancelling screenings, ordering edits and quietly narrowing the space for dissenting voices.

The constitutional frame is Article 19(1)(a), which guarantees every citizen the freedom of speech and expression. That freedom is not absolute: Article 19(2) allows the State to impose ‘reasonable restrictions’ — but only on a closed list of grounds, such as the sovereignty and integrity of India, public order, decency or morality, defamation and incitement to an offence. Crucially, the mere fact that a book or a lecture provokes anger is not, by itself, one of those grounds.

This is where the idea of a ‘heckler’s veto’ matters. When the authorities suppress otherwise lawful expression because a hostile group threatens disorder, they let the most intolerant reaction dictate what everyone else may read or watch. Courts have repeatedly cautioned that the answer to the threat of disorder is to maintain order and protect the speaker, not to silence the speech. The pattern recurs across cases — Tamil writer Perumal Murugan’s ‘Madhorubhagan’ (One Part Woman) and the long shadow of the ban on Salman Rushdie’s work — where offence, rather than any Article 19(2) ground properly applied, drove the restriction.

Any restriction that does survive must also be ‘reasonable’ and proportionate, not excessive or arbitrary. That is the standard a CLAT passage will usually test: whether a ban is genuinely tied to a listed ground and narrowly tailored, or whether it is really an attempt to appease outrage.

Nasrin’s possible homecoming is thus less about one writer than about a principle: a constitutional democracy protects speech precisely when it is unpopular, and reasonable restrictions under Article 19(2) cannot be stretched to mean whatever an angry crowd demands.