British-Indian author Salman Rushdie’s planned appearance at a literary festival in India was thrown into doubt yesterday because of security concerns caused by protests from influential Muslim clerics.
Rushdie was due to speak on Friday and Saturday at the five-day gathering in the city of Jaipur, 240km from New Delhi, but his name has been dropped from the program of events published on the Internet.
Event organizers, who declined to be named, said Rushie’s advertised appearances had been removed from the program for security reasons, but he was still expected to attend at some stage.
Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot told the NDTV news channel yesterday: “Salman Rushdie’s presence does have security implications and we are keeping a close watch and have been in touch with the organizers.”
“But at the same time, we can’t prevent him from coming since he is a PIO [Person of Indian Origin],” Gehlot said.
Festival producer Sanjoy Roy said: “He will not be in India on Jan. 20 due to a change of schedule. The festival stands by its invitation.”
He did not give further details.
Last week, the Darululoom Deoband seminary in Uttar Pradesh demanded the government stop Rushdie from entering the country because of his allegedly blasphemous writing about Islam.
The novelist spent a decade in hiding after Iranian spiritual leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa in 1989 calling for his death for passages in his novel The Satanic Verses.
“His books have hurt and insulted Muslims and Islam — how can he be a guest of this country?” asked Mufti Abul Qasim Nomani, the seminary vice chancellor. “We are not going to say anything about our plans if Rushdie comes to India. We are still in talks with the government and we are hopeful it will ban him.”
The seminary, which is one of the world’s most important Islamic universities, is known for its conservative teachings that are thought to have shaped the views of some radical Islamist groups such as the Taliban.
Jaipur’s literature festival attracts tens of thousands of Indian and overseas book fans every year with crowds able to mix with famous authors in the grounds of an old palace.
Rushdie, who won the Booker Prize for his 1981 novel Midnight’s Children, was born in Mumbai and attended the Jaipur festival in 2007.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the