Salman Rushdie: Power of the pen

Rushdie to return to India after death threats.

NEW DELHI:

Author Salman Rushdie will return to India this week to speak at a conference, two months after death threats forced the Booker Prize-winning author to pull out of Asia’s biggest literary festival, Jaipur Literature Festival, the event organiser said on Tuesday.

Rushdie’s attempt to visit India in January brought protests from some Indian Muslim groups that consider his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses blasphemous because of the way it portrayed the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh).

The British-Indian writer, who spent years in hiding after the book’s publication, subsequently accused Indian authorities of pandering to zealots and spoke in a television interview of India becoming “a totalitarian state like China”.

Rushdie, who won the Booker Prize for his novel Midnight’s Children in 1981, will speak on Friday alongside writer Aatish Taseer — son of governor of Punjab Salman Taseer — at a conference in New Delhi. The writer will participate in a discussion called ‘The Liberty Verses’, according to the event’s website.

“I think it’s excellent that Rushdie has decided to return,” said author William Dalrymple, who was the director of the Jaipur Literature Festival, which Rushdie couldn’t attend. “Our mistake at Jaipur was to announce his visit three weeks in advance, which gave everyone who opposed his visit time to mobilise,” Dalrymple said on Tuesday.

The publication of The Satanic Verses sparked protests around the world and death threats against Rushdie after Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini claimed that the novel’s portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) insulted Islam.

The row over Rushdie’s appearance at the Jaipur Literature Festival led to further criticism of the Congress party, which at the time was approaching a crucial election in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state and home to a large Muslim group.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 15^th, 2012.