Isn’t It A Real Shame Salman Rushdie Can’t Return Home Even In The 21st Century?
Even Oprah Winfrey could be in India for the much celebrated Jaipur literary festival to see the calm beneath the chaos that is India when Rushdie, a celebrated and invited guest and author was forced to stay away.
There is an auspicious time for almost everything in India. Then there is elections one need to watch out for the rest of the matters!
For Salman Rushdie, the celebrated author of ‘Satanic Verses’, an English novel considered offensive by many Muslims, the invitation and the visit n must have been a routine event.
Rushdie, who had to leave India, his mother land, in order to avoid the fatwa of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeni on his life in the late eighties, has made many private visits to India in recent years and even attended the Jaipur Literary Festival in 2007.
However this time, he had to abandon his plans at the last minute after receiving intelligence information that paid assassins are on the prowl in Jaipur to take his life.
The circumstances which led to his withdrawal provoked angry reaction from a section of the writers participating in the festival who made a public demonstration of their disgust by choosing to openly and publicly read out parts of the book which remains banned in India even after twenty years!
This obviously was against the law in India, making sure these authors who genuinely were agitated by the obstruction to literary freedom In India, which everyone must be ashamed of, will be subject to legal action and arrest by the police. In a bid to limit the damage and reputation of the event, they have since left the town!
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