Salman Rushdie says intelligence sources warned him that 'paid assassins from the Mumbai underworld' might try to kill him
Salman Rushdie has announced that he will not be attending the Jaipur literary festival, which started in the north-western Indian city on Friday, because of fears that he was being targeted by killers sent by local underworld figures.
"I have now been informed by intelligence sources … that paid assassins from the Mumbai underworld may be on their way to Jaipur to eliminate me," Rushdie said in an announcement read out to journalists at the festival. He said he had some doubts about the reliability of the information, but that it would be irresponsible to come to the festival in the circumstances.
"It would be irresponsible to my family, to the festival audience and to my fellow writers. I will therefore not travel to Jaipur as planned," the Indian-born author said. A row over Rushdie's presence at the festival broke out earlier this month after local journalists contacted a senior conservative Muslim cleric in India and told him about the writer's planned visit.
Maulana Qasim Nomani described Rushdie as having "hurt the sentiments of Muslims all over the world" and said he should not be allowed to enter India. Rushdie has been a controversial – though little-read – figure in the Islamic world since the 1988 publication of his work The Satanic Verses, which prompted a fatwa calling for his death from the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini and led to the author going into hiding.
Islamic groups have planned protest marches during the Jaipur festival, which features more than 250 writers and is predicted to be attended by more than 60,000 people. Increased security measures including sniffer dogs and the deployment of hundreds of police officers were seen as insufficient to protect Rushdie, 64, and the public.
Organisers were still hopeful that some kind of compromise could be found. Rushdie was due to give a talk on his work Midnight's Children, set in India, and participate in a discussion on the evolution of the English language in the country. Security experts described the idea of killers being dispatched by ganglords to kill the author as "far-fetched".
Indian officials, however, told the Guardian they feared some action by groups run by Dawood Ibrahim, a well-known organised crime boss, who they believe is closely linked to the Pakistani security establishment.
The Indian government, led by the centre-left Congress party, has made no public statement on the row. There are major state elections in coming weeks in which the votes of Muslim communities will play a critical role.
The festival organiser Sanjoy Roy said there was a need in India "to question how a person's notions and ideas are being blocked, why we continue as a nation to succumb to one pressure or another".
"This is a huge problem for Indian democracy," he said.
Rushdie previously attended the festival, Asia's biggest, in 2007 and frequently visits the country of his birth. William Dalrymple, the British travel writer, historian and a director of the festival, said Rushdie's writings had been "caricatured".
"Salman is a writer of enormous breadth. His … passionate engagement with Indian Islamic history shows he is far removed from the Islamophobe of myth. This is a great tragedy and we hope he will be able to come back again in the future," he said.