“Why the ban on ‘The Satanic Verses’ should be lifted now”, First Post, April 29, 2024:
“Sir Salman Rushdie—now, presumably, plain Citizen Rushdie of the US of A—has tersely stated in his just released book, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder that “India, the country of my birth and my deepest inspiration, on that day found no words.” That day was August 12, 2022, when the writer was stabbed multiple times by a fundamentalist 24-year-old Muslim-American assailant but miraculously survived—and has now told his tale in cutting prose.
Indeed, though External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar acknowledged the attack and the world’s reaction to it three days later, India’s official condemnation came only at the end of the month. But then Rushdie has never made it easy for anyone to support him without a degree of wariness. He has critiqued the Left, the Right, the Centre in every country that he has lived in or been connected with at some point or other. So, any position on him has to be a considered one.
He is undoubtedly the most prominent target of Islamic fundamentalism, for the Anglosphere or, more broadly the West. In India, however, that means a diminishing and increasingly fringe section of the old elite. Most Indians today have no idea what The Satanic Verses are; many may not even know it is a novel, or that its writer was in hiding for years because of a fatwa issued by the Ayatollah of Shia Iran to kill him. But a lot of Indians do know about fatwas…..”
Read the full article at Firstpost.com
