Jaipur:
Will Salman Rushdie show up or won't he? That is the question everyone is asking days ahead of the Jaipur Literature Festival, which starts on Friday.
On Tuesday, The Times of India reported in a front-page story that organizers of the festival had succumbed to pressure from government officials to cancel Mr. Rushdie's appearance over security concerns. Later in the day, however, organizers said that they had rescheduled his appearance but declined to say when he would be at the festival, India's largest annual literary event.
"He is not coming to India on the 20th and 21st of January," said Sanjoy K Roy, managing director of Teamwork Productions, the company organizing the festival. "The festival stands with its invitation," he added, seeming to put the ball in Mr. Rushdie's court.
Mr. Rushdie, who was born in Mumbai and wrote the celebrated "Midnight's Children" and the controversial "Satanic Verses," had been scheduled to speak on the opening day of the festival and at several other sessions during the five-day festival.
Though he spoke at the festival in 2007, his visit this year has been marred by controversy. Last week, Muslim leaders who argue that Mr. Rushdie blasphemed their religion in "Satanic Verses," which India banned when it came out in 1988, said he should be denied a visa to visit India. But it turned out that Mr. Rushdie didn't need a visa because he holds a Person of Indian Origin card.
More recently, top officials in the state of Rajasthan, of which Jaipur is the capital, argued that it would be difficult to guarantee Mr. Rushdie's security. The chief minister of the state, Ashok Gehlot, met India's home minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, on Tuesday to express his concerns about Mr. Rushdie's visit.
Muslim clerics in Jaipur, fondly known as the pink city, have threatened to launch statewide protests if he was allowed to attend the festival.
Officials in India's Ministry of Home Affairs, which oversees internal security, have made no statement about the controversy; neither discouraging Mr. Rushdie's visit, nor offering assurances about his security. Their silence has led to strong criticism of the government's ambivalent attitude toward free speech, especially on the social networking site Twitter.
For his part, Mr. Rushdie, who has recently become a prolific commentator on Twitter, has maintained a stoic silence on the issue since Wednesday, when he said that he would not respond to questions from journalists about the festival on Twitter. On Jan. 9, he wrote: "Re: my Indian visit, for the record, I don't need a visa."