Via Hindu: “I have been informed by Intelligence Bureau sources in Maharashtra and Rajasthan that paid assassins from the Mumbai underworld may be on their way to Jaipur to eliminate me. …It would be irresponsible of me to come to the Festival in such circumstances; irresponsible to my family, to the festival audience, and to my fellow writers. I will therefore not travel to Jaipur as planned,” Mr. Rushdie said in a statement read out by the Festival’s producer Sanjoy Roy.

Here is Salman Rushdie in his own words in Vanity Fair describing how and why his friend Christopher Hitchens stood by him after Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa calling for his death in 1989.

He, too, saw that the attack on The Satanic Verses was not an isolated occurrence, that, across the Muslim world, writers and journalists and artists were being accused of the same crimes—blasphemy, heresy, apostasy, and their modern-day associates, “insult” and “offense.” And he intuited that beyond this intellectual assault lay the possibility of an attack on a broader front. He quoted Heine to me: Where they burn books they will afterward burn people. (And reminded me, with his profound sense of irony, that Heine’s line, in his play Almansor, had referred to the burning of the Koran.) And on September 11, 2001, he, and all of us, understood that what had begun with a book burning in Bradford, Yorkshire, had now burst upon the whole world’s consciousness in the form of those tragically burning buildings.

During the campaign against the fatwa, the British government and various human-rights groups pressed the case for a visit by me to the Clinton White House, to demonstrate the strength of the new administration’s support for the cause. [...]

(On that visit to D.C., I stayed in the Hitchens apartment, and he was afterward warned by a State Department spook that my having been his houseguest may have drawn the danger toward him; maybe it would be a good idea if he moved house? He remained contemptuously unmoved.)

Are we to believe that a government that successfully pulled off such complex events under the shadow of terrorist threats as the Commonwealth Games, the 2001 Cricket World Cup, and an Obama state visit could not protect a writer and the attendees of a literary festival? The same writer who has been visiting India regularly since the fatwa, and even the same literary festival in 2007? What a bunch of baloney. The simple fact is that there is an election coming up in Uttar Pradesh and the Congress party does not want to ruffle any feathers in the Muslim community.

It’s a sad day for democracy in India. And a sadder day that Hitchens is not around to excoriate the whole lot of them…including Rushdie.

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And as the world prepares for its 7 billionth birth, the irony of the picture’s story is even more prescient.

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