Columnist Tavleen Singh, the mother of Aatish Taseer, a writer who was recently stripped off his Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) status, lashed out at the centre for doing so. The central government has accused Aatish of not disclosing that his father was Salman Taseer, a Pakistani politician.
Tavleen Singh who is a contributing writer for The Indian Express published an opinionated piece in the paper titled “Sending my son to exile”. In her piece, Singh has compared the unfortunate exile imposed on her son to the National Register of Citizens exercise in Assam and called it “not just wrong but evil”.
The columnist had initially assumed that the exile was prompted due to some misunderstanding and, therefore, tried to connect with the Ministry of Home Affairs to clear the tension. However, her efforts were not responded to by either the Ministry or Hiren Joshi, the officer of special duty (communication and information technology) in the Prime Minister’s Office.
Singh also talked about the very controversial article written by Aatesh for teh Time magazine which is being called as the reason behind the sudden withdrawal of Aatesh’s OCI. Singh said, “This had been a niggling fear at the back of my mind ever since he wrote that article in Time magazine that appeared on the cover with a distorted sketch of Narendra Modi and the words, ‘Divider in Chief’.” She added saying, “It was then that I realised that somebody very high up wanted revenge on Aatish”.
Aatish had written an article before teh Lok Sabha elections in India about the political landscape in India then and its key personalities that included PM Narendra Modi and former Congress president, Rahul Gandhi.
Singh also writes about how she talked to her son about his piece, she writes in the opinion piece, “I remember telling Aatish, then, that the article was inaccurate and ill-timed because this was in the last week of the Lok Sabha campaign and there were clear indications to me that Modi would be winning a second term.”
Singh also tried to defend her son by saying that though the article’s headline was offensive, “the content should have offended Rahul Gandhi more than Modi because in it the then Congress President was described as “an unteachable mediocrity”.
