I will come back to India, many times: Rushdie
Salman Rushdie, taking to a TV channel from London on Tuesday evening, was calm, even belligerent. He said the fact that he was allowed to interact with authors and readers at a literary festival “is much worse than censorship, because it comes with a threat of violence. It’s tyranny”.
He said that while he was “personally disappointed”, his “overwhelming feeling is disappointment on behalf of India, a country I have loved all my life”.
Blaming the leaders of Darul Uloom Deoband, “a group from which the Taliban got its ideology”, Rushdie said, “If this is the face of Islam that is going to take root in India, it’s a very bad state of affairs.”
Rushdie also blamed the government, both at the Centre and in Rajasthan, for what he called a “black farce”. “The fact that the Central government deferred (the issue of my visit) to the Rajasthan government, and the Rajasthan government behaved as it did, I mean it’s a scandalous state of affairs,” he said, adding, “Believe me, it will not stop me from coming to India. I will come to India many times, as I choose... I will not allow these religious gangsters and their cronies in the government to prevent me... I will come back to India, most certainly, most certainly, and many times. So deal with it.”
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