Our revolutions: the great Indian JLF

‘We don’t want to get our morals from our holy books,’ said Richard Dawkins at the annual Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) earlier this week. Some among his audience might have taken offence if they were listening, but they were too busy persecuting India’s most simultaneously celebrated and vilified writer-in-exile, Salman Rushdie.

When I spoke to festival director William Dalrymple two days before opening day, he anticipated some kind of a showdown between the ‘liberals inside and the angry beards outside’. And so it came to pass, as the eternal clash between Indian ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ played out on JLF’s stage. A week later, four JLF speakers who protested Rushdie’s banishment by reading from his banned book, The Satanic Verses, had been advised to leave; even his impish image via video link was denied entrance; the organizers were being criticized for backing down and discord had broken out within the global literary community.