(Author Salman Rushdie at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, Massachusetts February 26, 2012. REUTERS/Jessica Rinaldi)
Salman Rushdie will return 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, the event organizer said on Tuesday.
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 Mohammad.
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”.
Rushdie, who won the Booker Prize for his novel ‘Midnight’s Children’ in 1981, will speak on Friday in New Delhi alongside writer Aatish Taseer at a conference hosted by the India Today media group, in a discussion called ‘The Liberty Verses’, according to the event’s website.
