Rushdie, fatwa and terror this Valentine

A 1981 picture of Salman Rushdie when he won the Booker Prize for Midnight's Children. photo courtesy: Man Booker Prize


Sudhakar Jagdish

Page 88: …The world had rediscovered Flight AI-420, the Boeing 747 Bostan. Radar tracked it; radio messages crackled. Do you want permission to land? But no permission was requested. Bostan circled over England's shore like a gigantic seabird. Gull. Albatross. Fuel indicators dipped: towards zero…. The hostages watched the fight to death, unable to feel involved, because a curious detachment from reality had come over the aircraft a kind of inconsequential fatalism, one might say…. and although at that moment Buta and Dara rushed at her she pulled the wire anyway, and the walls came tumbling down. No, not death: birth…

Reading these passages from Salman Rushdie's controversial fiction The Satanic Verses on the eve of this Valentine's Day is riveting and laced with pieces of history -- contextual and contemporary. Two decades ago, on February 14, 1989, Rushdie was attending a memorial service in London. By then he was informed that Iranian Muslim leader Ayatollah Khomeini has issued a fatwa sentencing him to death for blasphemy against Islam. What followed was decades of Rushdie's hiding, attacks on bookstores and increasing decibel in the debate on censorship -- still a contemporary thing as pub goers are bashed in Mangalore, film posters are torn apart and a Bengali author is dashed off from one city to another in the darkest of hours.

(One of the several protests that erupted after The Satanic Verses was published in 1989)

In context is the opening chapter of the book where a hijacked Air India flight between Mumbai, then Bombay, and London is ripped apart by the explosive laden hijacker/terrorist over the English Channel. Rushdie penned the book which was preceded by Kanishka bombing over the Atlantic and followed by Lockerbie over Scotland. In the two decades, new boundaries were etched out in Eurasia, leaders got assassinated, Olympics were celebrated, earthquakes and Tsunami took lives, rising temperature drowned low-lying islands and incidents of terrorism rose exponentially. Headlines of attacks and toll in mammoth fonts and acerbic shades accompanies every breakfast, wrinkled image of Ajmal Kasab in a tabloid becomes lunchbox covers, word "bravo" is heard as people watch "The Stupid Common Man" coaxing the Mumbai Police Commissioner to hurry up to the War Room in A Wednesday.

Blasts are no more "exhilarating" but banal and has touched monotonous proportions akin to late 90s incidents of throwing grenades on Srinagar streets -- Is the frequency and commonality of the incidents are to blame for it? So could there be more spectacular attacks? As a former R & W officer and a well-known security expert R S N Singh puts it. "Soon there could be attacks, but in what form is hard to be ascertained." Another famous defence expert P R Chari says, "One have to run his/her imagination wild to get a premonition of what is in store." "High profile targets will be attacked, there could be assassination attempts," Singh adds. And according to Chari the terrorists could try to cripple the economy (for example) by attacking the nodal electric installations in a coordinated manner just like what the US did in Kosovo.

(The eight suspected terrorists who plotted to blow several trans-atlantic flights in 2006. The verdict in the case is awaited. photo courtesy: Photonews)

Treading over the Brooklyn Bridge, the numerical architecture of 11 is missing from the skyline, a visual accompanied with the echo of Daisycutters over Hindu Kush. Since then some youths in Bangladesh, Singh says, are sporting T-shirts with Osama's side and front profile. Chari says the tendency of terrorists have shifted from suicide attacks to suicidal attacks. The elongated queue of desperate youths to kill themselves for honour not only among the jehadis but also within outfits like the Tamil Tigers has only further elongated, he adds. And then. 79 days before this Valentine, a sketch of the triangle of horror was etched at an eye altitude of 10141 ft over the Google Earth's satellite image of Mumbai -- the birthplace of Rushdie and his Saladin Chamcha.

(Security man takes cover behind a fire brigade van as terrorists took the iconic Taj Hotel hostage during their three-day siege in Mumbai beginning November 26, 2008. photo courtesy: New York Times)