So by now we all know that Salman Rushdie will be addressing the Jaipur Lit Fest through a video uplink which will be thoroughly vetted by censors for inappropriate mentions of banned utterances. He was going to attend in person, but he now has some threat to his life, true or otherwise, and so our man is forced to present like he is giving a job interview in a neighborhood Reliance Web World.
Death of Free Speech, I hear you say?
Well, Free Speech was never alive in the first place, but anyway, that's not the point of this post.
The organizers could very well have saved the entire embarrassment to everyone concerned, if only they had organized the festival after March 3, 2012.
Eh???
Nothing to do with any astrological misalignment, of any kind.
You see, the entire brouhaha about Salman Rushdie, has nothing to do with him, his book, his speech, or anything like that, and has everything to do with the elections in our great state of Uttar Pradesh.
You do know that the Congress is in tough battle with the Samajwadi Party (at least in their minds) for the so-called "Muslim" vote there, don't you? Outlook tells me from a few weeks ago, that most of the population would vote for whomever the village imam sahib would tell them to vote for. The Muslim vote would define the power brokers in Uttar Pradesh, a crowning moment for Rahul Gandhi to gain ascendancy into an eventual prime ministerial berth.
Put it another way, not a single participant, author, reader, fan, organizer, journalist, or Reliance Web World operator is going to vote in Uttar Pradesh come February. Do you seriously believe that, with so much at stake, by inviting the one man in this world who is associated with blasphemy against the Prophet (PBUH), a Congress chief minister would risk giving the SP so much of an advantage?
So I ask you again,
Death of Free Speech??
Or
A Vibrant Democracy??
No comments:
Post a Comment