Open letter to Rajiv Gandhi in 1988 was 'arrogant', admits Rushdie

Twenty four years after he shot off an open letter to the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi criticising the ban on The Satanic Verses, India-born controversial author Salman Rushdie now admits that his reaction was "arrogant", "angry" and "cheek".

65-year-old Rushdie, whose 633-page memoir titled Joseph Anton hit the stands yesterday, narrates mainly his life in hiding for over nine years after the controversial book resulted in an Iranian 'fatwa' and world-wide protests against him but also writes feelingly about his engagement with India.

In the book written in the third-person, Rushdie recalls that Salman Haider, a family friend and the then deputy high commissioner of India in London, had called him to formally inform him that The Satanic Verses had been banned in India.

Rushdie writes that the ban pained him, more so after his previous book, Midnight's Children, had been "so enthusiastically received" in India, which was "a source of great pride."

It made the ban on importing The Satanic Verses in the country "a painful blow."

On his widely-published open letter to Rajiv Gandhi at the time, Rushdie admits that it was arrogant: "This was... not how novelists were supposed to behave: scolding a prime minister. This was... arrogant. This was cheek."

The author goes on: "Well, OK, that was arrogant. Angry and injured also, but the arrogance was undeniably there. Very well. So it was".

"He was defending a thing he revered above most things, the art of literature, against a piece of blatant political opportunism. Maybe a little intellectual arrogance was called for."

The letter that was widely published on October 9, 1988 complained of the official statements that The Satanic Verses had been banned as a pre-emptive measure.

'Apparently my book is not deemed blasphemous or objectionable in itself, but is being proscribed for, so to speak, its own good!... This is no way, Mr Gandhi, for a free society to behave,' Rushdie had written.

'What sort of India do you wish to govern? Is it to be an open or a repressive society? Your action in the matter of The Satanic Verses will be an important indicator for many people around the world'.

He had also accused Rajiv Gandhi of personal vendetta.

'Perhaps you feel that by banning my fourth novel you are taking long overdue revenge for the treatment of your mother in my second, but can you be sure that Indira Gandhi's reputation will endure better and longer than Midnight's Children?' he wrote.

Rushdie writes in his book that the open letter was an attempt to take the cultural high ground, and it concluded with a rhetorical appeal "to that posterity whose judgement could not be known by either Rajiv Gandhi or himself: 'You own the present, Mr Prime Minister; but the centuries belong to art'".

According to Rushdie, Indian governments from the mid- 1970s onwards, "ever since the time of Indira and Sanjay Gandhi," had "often given in to pressure from religious interest groups, especially those claiming to control large blocks of votes."

He writes: "By 1988, Rajiv Gandhi's weak government, with elections due in November, cravenly surrendered to threats from two opposition Muslim MPs who were in no position to 'deliver' the Muslim electorate's votes to the Congress party."

Recalling the ban on The Satanic Verses, Rushdie writes that he did not expect it, "innocently, naively, even ignorantly."