Source: Times of India.

To those blessed – or perhaps cursed, given the times we live in – with a long memory, Salman Rushdie’s absence from the Jaipur Literature Festival and the parallel and related Congress courtship of the Muslim vote in Uttar Pradesh are an eerie and discomforting throwback to the politics of the mid-1980s. And, indeed, to the original banning of the Satanic Verses.

The ban was imposed by the Rajiv Gandhi government in October 1988, nine days after the book’s release in Britain. It was the first prohibition on Rushdie’s novel by any government anywhere in the world. It preceded and some would argue provoked the February 1989 Iranian fatwa sentencing the author to death. In retrospect, the Satanic Verses chapter was an inflection point in the evolution of contemporary pan-Islamist truculence.

Rajiv Gandhi’s motivations were decidedly domestic. His Congress government was in the midst of turbulence, caused by the surrender to conservative Muslim opinion in the Shah Bano case in 1986. To compensate for it, Gandhi then opened the locks to a contested shrine in Ayodhya, and so began a downward spiral. The Satanic Verses ban was the next milestone.
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