Rushdie no-show

The recent cancellation of Salman Rushdie's appearance at the Jaipur Literary Festival marks a frightening defeat for free expression everywhere, particularly in India, where the festival's organisers relented to pressure from local authorities to scrap the controversial author's plans to attend. Perhaps more disturbing is the news of bogus intelligence reports provided to Rushdie, which suggested that radical Muslim clerics with malevolent intentions — as well as "paid assassins from the Mumbai underworld" — may pose a significant threat to his safety.

Secondary plans for a video link were not allowed to be carried out either, and Rushdie, angered by the developments, spoke to NDTV about the "fantastically fishy" affair. David Remnick writes:

The shameful episode in Jaipur is, indeed, best seen in light of deeper, and troubling, tendencies of contemporary Indian politics. The country is Hindu majority, but the government seems eager to court the huge Muslim populace at election time, no matter how troubling the demands. One famous and trendsetting example: in 1978, a Muslim woman named Shah Bano was divorced from her husband. Shah Bano had no means to support herself and her five children, and she appealed to the civil courts to get alimony; after seven years she succeeded in winning a judgment from the Supreme Court. But then, under heavy pressure from Muslim groups and clerics, the government of Rajiv Gandhi reversed the Court’s judgment and passed the Muslim Women’s Bill, which decreased the authority of civil authority. That move, ceding greater power to religious authorities, was widely seen as a purely political attempt by Gandhi to win Muslim political support. Civil liberties groups and Hindu factions were enraged.

British Indian novelist Hari Kunzru spoke at the festival, and remarked that "today is a bleak day for Indian literature. We heard earlier from Gurcharan Das, Alex Watson and Oscar Pujol about the place that doubt, dissent and argumentation held in the very origins of Indian thought [this is a reference to an earlier session, which dealt with skepticism in Vedic philosophy]. Today, one of India’s greatest novelists, Salman Rushdie—a writer whose work enshrines doubt as a necessary and valuable ethical position—has been prevented from addressing this festival by those whose certainty leads them to believe that they have the right to kill anyone who opposes them.

"This kind of blind, violent certainty is in opposition to everything the festival stands for—openness, intellectual growth and the free exchange of ideas. There are many rights for which we should fight, but the right to protection from offense is not one of them. Freedom of speech is a foundational freedom, on which all others depend. Freedom of speech means the freedom to say unpopular, even shocking things. Without it, writers can have little impact on the culture. Unless we come out strongly in support of Rushdie’s right to be here, and to speak to us, we might as well shut the doors of this hall and go home."

It's simply outrageous, and almost unthinkable, that anyone could be subject to such threats for writing a work of fiction. For anyone who cares about free expression, Rushdie's absence demonstrates a contemptible and unpardonable affront to the very foundations of every functioning democracy. (Image via Flickr, by Alexander Baxevanis)