Salman Rushdie and India's Free Speech Debate

Thick with palaces, elephants and crowded old bazaars, the Pink City of Jaipur is a postcard from ‘exotic India’ brought vividly to life. Its annual literary festival may be only six years old, but it tries to live up to its setting, adding 21^st century flash and dazzle to the mix. This year did not disappoint. More than 60,000 people squeezed into the elaborately painted halls and cool cotton tents of the Diggi Palace to gawk at literary celebrities and witness a raging controversy surrounding the absence of much-feted writer Salman Rushdie, whose controversial The Satanic Verses — which earned Rushdie a fatwa from Iran’s mullahs — is still banned in his home country. For all the festival’s glitz, Rushdie’s no-show has stirred up a long-overdue debate about India’s limits on free expression.