The writer Salman Rushdie will travel to India this week to speak at a conference, under two months after death threats forced the Booker Prize-winning author to pull out of Asia’s biggest literary festival.
Rushdie’s attempt to visit India in January brought protests from some Indian Muslim groups, which consider his 1988 novel
The Satanic Verses
blasphemous because of the way it portrayed the Prophet Muhammad. The British Indian writer, who spent years in hiding after the book’s publication, subsequently accused Indian authorities of pandering to zealots, and spoke in a television interview of India becoming “a totalitarian state like China”.
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Rushdie will speak on Friday in New Delhi alongside writer Aatish Taseer. – (Reuters)