Indian cities turn away Bangladesh author: officials

New Delhi, India - Controversial Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen was under Indian police protection on Friday after Muslims hit the streets demanding her expulsion for blasphemy, officials said.

Violent protests by thousands of Muslims led to Nasreen first being ushered out of riot-hit Kolkata city late Thursday.

Police in the West Bengal capital put her on a flight to Jaipur, but the local Rajasthan government there also told her to leave at dawn on Friday.

"She arrived here without informing us. Because of security reasons, the government has asked her to leave," Rajasthan's home minister Gulab Chand Kataria told reporters.

The 45-year-old author declined to say where she was after leaving Rajasthan amid unconfirmed media reports she was heading for the federal capital New Delhi.

"I am mentally distressed. I am not well at all," Nasreen told the Press Trust of India by telephone.

"I am not in a position to talk. I am shattered," she told the news agency.

Nasreen, who lives in self-imposed exile in India, was escorted by Rajasthan police to the state border, where police from neighbouring Haryana were to take over security arrangements, officials said.

It was unclear exactly where Nasreen would go.

"The Kolkata police has been advising me to leave the city on grounds of my security, and I was brought here as it was felt that I would be safe here," Nasreen told The Hindu newspaper before leaving Kolkata.

"I have no place to go. India is my home, and I would like to keep living in this country till I die," she said.

Soldiers were called out in the eastern city formerly known as Calcutta after thousands demonstrated, demanding Nasreen's expulsion from India for allegedly insulting the Prophet Mohammad.

Media reports said New Delhi had extended her Indian visa, which was due to expire in February 2008.

The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has demanded a permanent visa for Nasreen, saying she should be be allowed the freedom of speech enjoyed by those who make anti-Hindu remarks.

Nasreen was being "treated like a football", senior BJP leader Yashwant Sinha was quoted as saying by PTI.

West Bengal has a large Muslim population and shares the Bengali language and much of the culture of Bangladesh.

The country was a part of Bengal state before it was split along religious lines as the eastern wing of Pakistan when India gained freedom from British rule in 1947. Bangladesh was founded after an independence war in 1971.

"I am a Bengali in mind. I like the city and I want to stay here," Nasreen told AFP in September, adding she had applied for Indian citizenship. The authorities had already turned her down in 2005.

"If they expel me from a liberal and democratic country (like India), I will never me able to live on the Indian subcontinent," Nasreen wrote to a French group, the Women's Alliance for Democracy, in October.

Radical Muslims in Bangladesh accuse her of blasphemy over her debut novel "Lajja" or "Shame" and called for her execution. The author fled fearing for her life in 1994, but the authorities say she can return.

"She is a citizen of this country. There is no problem from Bangladesh if she wants to come here," Dhaka foreign ministry official Nazmul Quaunine told AFP.

"Lajja" tells the life of a Hindu family persecuted by Muslims in Bangladesh and is banned in the Muslim-majority country.

In March, a Muslim group in Uttar Pradesh state offered a bounty for Nasreen's execution.

There was a physical attack on the author by Muslim activists in the southern Hyderabad city in August. She was also threatened with criminal charges for her "anti-Islamic" views.

Later the same month, Kolkata police stepped up security for the writer after another death threat from a Muslim cleric.