LITERATURE \\ The Jaipur Literature Festival 2012 began on a low note this year due to raging protests within the country by Islamic fundamentalists. They were agitating against celebrated author Salman Rushdie in a bid to stop his arrival in the country. Despite this, Rushdie was committed to attending the festival after a gap of five years. However, just days before he was due to show-up, he decided against his visit, citing security concerns as the main reason for not attending the festival. He said he had received concrete threats and stated, “I have now been informed by intelligence sources in Maharashtra and Rajasthan that paid assassins from Mumbai underworld may be on their way to Jaipur to ‘eliminate’ me.” He claimed that he was cancelling his visit in the interests of his family as well as the safety of other visitors to the festival. However, the Maharashtra police later declined the sharing of any such information with Rushdie, saying that they had no information that gangsters or paid assassins from the Mumbai underworld had planned to eliminate Rushdie. But they also said that they were not aware if Rajasthan police had any such inputs and shared the information with Rushdie. Reports published in The Hindu later claimed that it was a plot invented by local intelligence officials in Rajasthan to keep Rushdie from attending the festival. According to the same report, the festival administration sources informed the paper that the threat to Rushdie came from two hit men indentified as “Altaf Batli” and “Aslam Kongo”. However, the Mumbai police denied the existence of the assassins after scanning through their database. Adding fuel to fire, four renowned authors—Hari Kunzru, Ruchir Joshi, Amitava Kumar and Jeet Thayil—read excerpts from Rushdie’s banned book Satanic Verses in an unscheduled session, risking arrest. As word got out, protests began within Jaipur, compelling them to leave the city the next day. On the last day of the festival, a video conference was organised at the venue, in which Rushdie was to address the people. But due to protests by the Jaipur-based Milli Council, the video conference was scrapped on the very afternoon it was to take place. Several activists of the Milli Council gathered at the venue claiming the conference was an insult to Muslims. Rushdie, in an interview with the television news channel NDTV 24x7, blamed politics for this. Calling the decision “awful”, he said that it was somehow linked to the elections in UP. Freedom of expression has become the hot topic in the country post the festival, with many quarters condemning the organisers and the government for their weak stand. The government’s failure to act on the matter is also being seen as the politics of minority appeasement.