Police in Maharashtra on Saturday cast doubts on the threat to life of Salman Rushdie from ‘paid assassins’ from Mumbai that led the controversial India-born author to pull out of the Jaipur Literary Festival.
Authors outraged at the circumstances, which prompted the novelist, who also faced protests, to cancel his visit meanwhile were under the scanner of Jaipur Police after they read out passages from his banned book ‘Satanic Verses’ to show their solidarity.
Announcing his cancellation in a message on the first day of the Literary event that kicked off yesterday, the Booker Prize winning author said he had been told by intelligence sources in Maharashtra and Rajasthan that ‘paid assassins’ from the Mumbai underworld may be on their way to Jaipur to ‘eliminate’ him. Rushdie claimed that this input prompted him to scrap his planned visit to the country.
"When we had no information that gangsters or paid assassins from Mumbai underworld had planned to eliminate Salman Rushdie how could we have shared it to anybody," Maharashtra Director General of Police K. Subramaniam told the media in Mumbai.
Subramaniam, however, said he was not aware if Rajasthan police had any such inputs and had shared information with Rushdie.
Mumbai police crime branch, which usually deals with underworld-related cases, also categorically denied having received any intelligence inputs about threat to Rushdie. "We do not have any information suggesting that underworld is planning to harm Rushdie," said Deputy Police Commissioner (Crime) Nisar Tamboli.
"Rushdie faces threat only from fundamentalists and not the underworld," a senior IPS officer who did not want to be named said, adding, "I don't think that fundamentalists have given any contract for killing Rushdie."
Jaipur police have sought video footage of yesterday's session in which some authors read a portion from Satanic Verses banned in India for allegedly hurting the sentiments of Muslims after it was published in 1988.