Kolkata, Aug 17 (IANS) Muslim clerics in West Bengal Friday issued a "death warrant" against Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen if she did not pack her bags and leave India.

"Anybody eliminating her would be given Rs 100,000 and unlimited rewards if she does not leave the country immediately. She has insulted Islam and continued to create problem in this country," Syed Noor-ur-Rehman Barkati, the shahi imam of Tippu Sultan Mosque in Kolkata, told IANS.

"We are forced to issue such a warrant because the government is not making use of the constitutional provisions and driving her out of the country," Barkati said after a meeting of several Muslim clerics across India here.

Nasreen was not available to react to the latest development.

On Aug 9, Taslima Nasreen, who lives in Kolkata, was attacked at a book release function at the Hyderabad Press Club by legislators and activists of the Majlis Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM), a Muslim political party in Andhra Pradesh.

"Taslima Hatao, Desh Bachao (Drive out Taslima and save the country) is our slogan and we will launch a big agitation if the government continued to patronise her and allow her to stay in India," Barkati said.

"She should leave within a month," he said after the meeting that was attended by some of the major Muslim organisations of India, including All India Sunni Ulema Board and representatives from Hyderabad where she was attacked.

In January 2004, Barkati had urged a congregation of 10,000 that he would offer 20,000 rupees ($436) to anyone who would blacken Taslima's face "with ink, paint or tar or she can be garlanded with shoes."

In June 2006 the same imam offered on local TV the sum of 50,000 rupees ($1,175) to anyone who blackened her face and drove her out of Kolkata.

The 45-year-old writer had first attracted the ire of fundamentalists in Bangladesh for criticising the treatment of women in Islam and atrocities on Hindu minorities in that country in her novel "Lajja" (The Shame). She first went into hiding in 1994 and then fled Bangladesh with support from international human rights organisations like PEN and Amnesty International.

She was given asylum in Sweden. Since then she has lived in Germany, France, the US and later Kolkata in India, where she got a tourist visa though her requests for citizenship have been repeatedly turned down by the Indian government.

Nasreen's visa, scheduled to expire this month, was extended by six months till February next year.

"If I were a citizen of India perhaps people would not have thought that I could be killed just like that. The truth is that I cannot return to Bangladesh while returning to Europe is like courting death too. I can only live here in Kolkata," Nasreen told IANS in an interview last week.

Though the Left Front government in West Bengal condemned the attack on Nasreen on Thursday, it had banned her book "Dwikhandito" (Split in Two), the third volume of her seven-part autobiography, till a court order lifted it.

IANS

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