Valentine’s Day this year will mark the twenty-third anniversary of the Iranian fatwa against the novelist Salman Rushdie. Initially the death threats against Rushdie provoked an intelligent and necessary defence of his right to freedom of expression, but in many quarters the debate lapsed into an acrimonious quarrel on tangential matters. For some the sentence against Rushdie spoke directly to the misplaced idealism of multiculturalism, for others it was an understandable response to Western condescension. Accusations of insensitivity were met with counter-accusations that blasphemy – the essential complaint against Rushdie – is a mediaeval offence that ought to have no place in the modern world.
Over time many of these passions cooled, particularly after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini — who issued the death sentence without ever reading the book. Twenty years later Rushdie had returned to making public readings and being interviewed at literary festivals around the world.
This changed two weeks ago when Rushdie was forced to withdraw from the Jaipur Literary Festival (JLF) following new death threats in the wake of a protest by the Deoband madrasa. As a compromise, the organizers of the festival arranged for him to speak via video link from London, but this too had to be cancelled when large numbers of protesters threatened violence if even his voice was heard by the audience. One protester warned the Times of India that “rivers of blood will flow here if they show Rushdie.” Despite this intimidation, four authors – including one former critic of Rushdie – very bravely read extracts from Rushdie’s work during their own appearances. Nevertheless the damage was done and the incident showed India in a very poor light. David Remnick, editor of the prestigious New Yorker magazine and one of the invited authors, pointedly referred to the intimidation of Rushdie as a “blot on Indian democracy.”
The writer William Dalyrmple, one of the JLF’s organizers, subsequently wrote in the Guardian about the practical difficulties of reconciling free speech with public safety on the final day of the show. As he and his colleagues anxiously awaited Rushdie’s appearance by video link, the local police warned of imminent violence from protesters gathered inside the venue – in fact some were already “turfing school children out of their seats and intimidating festival guests.”
Dalrymple noted that this sorry finale could not have been more different to Rushdie’s appearance at the JLF five years earlier: “unannounced, with no bodyguards or police protection, [speaking] brilliantly, sitting drinking tea and signing books for his fans, while giving avuncular advice to younger writers … No objections were raised, no politicians got involved, no problems arose.” He further recalled the festival’s courageous decision not to withdraw invitations to Pakistani authors following the Mumbai attacks. Here, despite serious fears of violence, the threatened authors turned out to be “the stars of the show, feted by festival audiences and treated like rock stars.”
What had changed, of course, was the political climate. This year’s festival took place just a few months after the Rajasthan police shot and killed 10 Muslim protesters at a city close to Jaipur, and the festival’s schedule coincided with a hotly contested election in Uttar Pradesh “in which the vote of the Muslim community was deemed to be crucial.” Consequently, when the Maulana Nomani of Deoband called for a lifelong ban against Rushdie returning to India, Dalrymple observed that “not a single Indian politician was willing to state clearly and unequivocally that he was welcome in the country in which he was born, which he loved, which he had celebrated in his fiction and to whose literature he had made such a ground-breaking contribution.” Another clear indication that the real problem is politics rather than religion can be seen in the equally shameful silences which greeted recent protests by Hindu nationalists against a novel by Rohinton Mistry, a scholarly study of the Ramayana by AK Ramanujan, art by the modernist painter MF Husain, and even a biography of Mahatma Gandhi.
Some of the clearest thinking on the new Rushdie affair has come, fittingly, from the Indian author Amit Chaudhuri. After a critical survey of India’s poor record on defending freedom of expression, Chaudhuri observes that: “[b]eing disagreeable is fundamental to a democracy, and so it’s admissible for Rushdie to be disagreeable in The Satanic Verses, for his critics to be disagreeable about him, and for his Islamic detractors too, if they so wish; but it’s inadmissible under the law for any of these parties to use violence or coercion.” Chaudhuri continues that the courageous readings of the forbidden novel have to continue if Indian democracy is serious about its notional commitment to free speech, and that “our secular middle class – in which I include myself – needs to learn that free speech can’t be arrived at via a well-mannered compromise with its enemies. Yet free speech can be peaceably pursued.”
