January 24, 2012

Authors charged with “intent to cause riot” for reading from Satanic Verses at Jaipur Festival

by Valerie Merians

“At least half-a-dozen court cases have been filed against four authors and three organisers of the Jaipur Literature Festival where extracts from Salman Rushdie‘s banned book The Satanic Verses were publicly read on January 20,” according to this report in the Times of India.

Among those being charged with “wantonly giving provocation with intent to cause riot,” among other charges, are authors Hari Kunzru, Amitava Kumar, Jeet Thayil and Ruchir Joshi, and festival organizers Sanjoy Roy, Namita Gokhale, William Dalrymple.

As reported earlier on Mobylives, Rushdie’s planned attendance at the Jaipur festival outraged many Muslim groups who petitioned the government to deny him entry. The government denied their requests, and Rushdie blithely Twittered, “Re: my Indian visit, for the record, I don’t need a visa.” But to many commentators, like those on IBN TV, this politicizing of Rushdie and The Satanic Verses, is the result of the up-coming Indian elections. (Rushdie subsequently backed down from attending, although a new report in The Guardian says he may appear via a video link.)

With this latest round of opposition to Rushdie and the book, the controversy shows no signs of abating. The offending readers and event organizers are being prosecuted for several offenses. Below is a itemized list, from the Times of India.

IPC Section 153 involves prosecution for wantonly giving provocation with intent to cause riot, Section 153A relates to punishment for promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, Section 295A pertains to deliberate and malicious acts, intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious covers beliefs and Section 298 is invoked for uttering words with deliberate intent to wound the religious feelings of any person.

As the Times puts it:

The hardliner Muslim organizations and community leaders have been opposing Rushdie’s participation in the literary event this year even though the author attended it as one of the speakers in 2007. The Muslim community protesters maintain that Rushdie’s book has hurt its religious sentiments.

Hearings are set to begin today.

Valerie Merians is the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.

3 Comments

Amelia Perkins at 12:52 am on January 24, 2012

Rushdie should do us all a favor and attend the Kabul lit festival
Ayatollah, the local guradian at 2:03 am on January 24, 2012

My religious sentiments are hurt because young women wear clothes.
Satish Chandra at 6:05 pm on January 24, 2012

There are literary prizes given in India but can you imagine any of them accorded the hoopla and divine status the nigger-shits of the Indian media (add to that Sheila Dick-shit, the Chief Minister of Delhi, who just invited the “very very eminent” Rushdie to Delhi but not me) attach to the Booker Prize just because it is given by the White Master to native dog-shits — another example, besides Rushdie who is in the news now, is the stinking lump of shit named Arundhati Roy who won the prize by titillating her masters with soft porn and literary gems like ‘he “fucked” her all over the living room floor and on every piece of furniture’ or something like that — who are promoted and patronised by Jews — Rushdie-shit lives under the patronage of Jews in New York — about one of whom — Arundhati Roy — I would say Cut Off Her Ugly Tits & Throw Her On A Dung-Heap? This is what I wrote about Arundhati Roy-shit in my press release dated August 27, 2008 (included in my blog, ‘Nuclear Supremacy For India Over U.S.’):-

———-START QUOTE———-
2. Recently there have been a number of columns/articles in Indian newspapers urging the grant of ‘azadi’ to Kashmir. Like the celebratory headlines (such as “azadi in air” in the RAW-mouthpiece Times of India) that I referred to below, these columns/articles are all RAW-sponsored. As I said many years ago, RAW keeps a large stable of writers/journalists for such purposes. These columns/articles were sponsored by RAW in response to what I said about Kashmir, when approached for signature on a petition regarding the Baltics and mentioned in the Press Release dated August 15, 2008 below (“I am from India. We wouldn’t let Kashmir go if we have to kill every single Kashmiri”). These columns commenced with one by Arundhati Roy who was brought by RAW into its stable when I wrote a critical review of her novel. Later, when I referred to her as ‘The inferior Indian nigger woman whose claim to press coverage is her pornographic novel calling Indians cannibals (which they are not; see my review of the book which the inferior Indian niggers of the Indian press never published, in part due to the intervention of the inferior Indian niggers of the Indian Stupid Agency which promoted her by, among other things, arranging for her to be feted in Sri Lanka after my review)…’, RAW turned her overnight into a social and political activist and arranged for her to give a press conference on some Indian social issue in New York City because the New York correspondent for the United News of India (UNI) had once volunteered to arrange a press conference for me in New York on the subject of the United States using India’s population as guinea pigs for AIDS vaccine development on which I had been writing. (When the Boston Globe published a letter of mine, after its editorial on the rising incidence of dowry killings in India by relatives demanding cars, VCRs, etc., in which I said it was a consequence of rising “consumerism” due to contact with the West which used to be forbidden so that both the young Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru were required to do penance and undergo purification before being allowed back into society on their return from England, though only Gandhi — who later launched a mass movement to shun Western consumer goods and ritually burned them in bonfires — complied, RAW sponsored large annual conferences at Harvard University for several years on the subject of India’s dowry deaths — just one of hundreds of such acts of ‘neutralizing’ me it has undertaken). Roy’s article urging ‘azadi’ for Kashmir was followed by similar columns by Vir Sanghvi in Hindustan Times and by S. A. Aiyar and Jug Suraiya in the Times of India — all of them operatives of C.I.A.-RAW — and others while RAW organised further ‘azadi’ rallies in Kashmir of the kind I referred to below. The Times of India also sponsored a public opinion poll asking whether India should let Kashmir “go”, to make the unthinkable thinkable in India (see the Press Release dated August 26, 2008 below, “What You Should Know About RAW”).
——–END QUOTE———

The following letter of mine, which appeared in the Manchester Guardian Weekly, put an end to the Rushdie debate in the U. K. two decades ago:-

——–START OF LETTER——–
According to widely accepted psychological theory (both psychoanalytic and behavioral) one of the chief characteristics of literary behavior is that it allows the reader or writer to engage in otherwise punished behavior. One of the devices employed by the writer for this purpose is literary symbolism which refers to behavior that has some of the rewarding features of normally punished behavior while lacking enough the similarity to the original punished stimulus to be allowed evocation. From a psychological and technical point of view, then, the punishment evoked by the Rushdie book is not surprising and can be called a simple failure of symbolism.

Satish Chandra
———-END OF LETTER———

Note that CIA-RAW routinely remove even comments I post on news stories in the media, besides forbidding any mention of me in the media, jailing for several years the editor and publisher of News India-Times, New York, who carried front page news stories about me, brutally beating to death and dumping his body in a ditch outside Delhi a Muslim newspaper cartoonist who published a cartoon showing the Italian woman being thrown out of an airplane after I suggested in a letter to the press that she be thrown out of an airplane, etc., etc.

Which is the bigger news, Rushdie or the following?

This is what the Jews, Americans and RAW have been doing to the world’s greatest scientist and greatest living Indian for the past 35 years:-

“India’s greatest scientist and greatest living Indian publicly tortured in Harvard seminar, systematically and totally starved for up to 3 weeks at a time, made semi-starved and homeless and even blind for years, kept under 24-hour audio and video surveillance as well as surveillance of [and interference with] communications and electrical typewriter and computer use, document creation and photocopying, etc., by satellite for more than past 3 decades, systematically harassed and in poverty and neutralised and robbed of his work at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars per year, robbed of crores in his money and property in India by C.I.A.-RAW, forced back into exile in the U.S., all with full cooperation and participation of India’s RAW and India’s C.I.A.-RAW-controlled prime ministers, politicians and media — to keep India poor, weak and enslaved” and how this means the nuclear destruction of New Delhi and then the coast-to-coast destruction of the United States. See ThisIsWhatTheJewsHaveBeenDoingDOTblogspotDOTcom .

Satish Chandra