Salman Rushie Banned From Literary Festival

As anyone who’s complained that the Q&A all-literary panels are boring will assume, writers can seem a fairly sedate bunch – at least in comparison with politicians. Such assumptions were blown out of the water at the Jaipur Literature Festival, which closed this week amid controversy and claims of censorship.

All because of a book written three decades ago!

It started because multi-award-winning author Salman Rushdie was scheduled to appear at the festival, held in the north-west Indian state of Rajasthan. This prompted a campaign from local Islamic groups to prevent the author from attending, and reports that paid assassins had been hired to “eliminate” him if he did.

Rushdie is no stranger to such threats, of course. Not since his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses infamously enraged Iranian Muslim leader Ayatollah Khomeini so much that he issued a fatwa requiring the author's execution. But Rushdie cancelled his trip all the same, saying on Twitter “Very sad not to be at jaipur. I was told bombay mafia don issued weapons to 2 hitmen to 'eliminate' me. Will do video link instead. Damn.”

But the video appearance was also cancelled, after threats of "dangerous consequences" if it went ahead. "We have told organisers that we will not allow them to go ahead with the video link. Thousands of our people are inside and there will be dangerous consequences if the organisers go ahead with the video link," The India Times quoted a representative of the Rajasthan Muslim Forum saying.

Crowds reacted angrily, and Rushdie condemned the move. "Threat of violence by Muslim groups stifled free speech today. In a true democracy, all get to speak, not just the ones making threats" he wrote on Twitter.

But the controversy doesn’t end there. After reports claiming the Rajasthan police invented the death-threat plot to keep Rushdie away, the whole sorry affair has thrown light on the corruption at the heart of the world’s biggest democracy.

Despite now being freely available in many Muslim countries – including Egypt, Turkey, and Libya – The Satanic Verses has been banned in India since its publication. “Does India want to be a totalitarian country like China?” Rushdie asked in a TV interview after the brouhaha. He went on to claim that this was “just one incident in a trend of sectarian politics displacing secular India” over the past few decades. “If censorship continues, India will cease to be a free country,” he concluded.

Although a majority Hindu nation, India has a vocal Muslim minority, who hold great power over the government ahead of elections. And this year just happens to be an election year in the state of Uttar Pradesh, which neighbours Rajasthan. Many are now claiming that incident in Jaipur is a pawn in a larger political game, seeking to curry favour with Muslim interests.

Ironically, The Satanic Verses wasn’t originally a part of the festival program. Rushdie had planned to give a talk on his Booker of Bookers-winning novel Midnight’s Children, and to take part in a discussion on the history of English in India. But his cancellation led other attendees, including British author Hari Kunzru, to do a public reading from the banned book – a criminal act in India.