The Moor’s Last Alibi

Scarred by Islamist violence, Salman Rushdie now reserves his sharpest anxieties for Hindu nationalism, exposing a troubling asymmetry in his moral vision.

Salman Rushdie has long been celebrated as literature’s most famous survivor. Few writers have paid a higher price for metaphor, irony and irreverence. A fatwa issued by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 turned a novelist into a fugitive; for a decade he lived under police protection, changing addresses as often as pronouns. Translators and publishers were stabbed or shot. Then, in 2022, a young Islamist zealot plunged a knife into Rushdie’s neck and abdomen on a stage in New York, leaving him blind in one eye and lucky to be alive.

It is therefore jarring that Rushdie now says he is “very worried” about Hindu nationalism and shrinking freedoms in Narendra Modi’s India. Speaking recently to Bloomberg, he suggested that the warning signs had been visible for decades. India, in his telling, is sliding into majoritarian intolerance, rewriting history and throttling dissent.

To be sure, these ‘anxieties’ are well-worn staples of an anti-Modi ecosystem that has turned the denunciation of Hinduism into a cottage industry. What merits scrutiny is not criticism of the government per se, but the moral economy in which Hindu civilisation is treated as an endlessly legitimate target which is safe to caricature, cheap to moralise against and cost-free to condemn while far deadlier forms of religious absolutism are either relativised or politely ignored. Rushdie’s commentary fits comfortably within this asymmetry and exposes his breathtaking hypocrisy.

For decades, India’s self-described progressives have confused iconoclasm with courage, mistaking the ability to offend the majority for proof of ‘intellectual bravery,’ while carefully avoiding belief systems that respond to satire with blood.

Rushdie’s life is a catalogue of Islamist violence. He was cancelled before cancellation culture had a name. His books were banned across Muslim-majority countries. More than 45 people associated with The Satanic Verses were attacked or killed worldwide. All the apologies he counted for nothing.

Against this blood-soaked backdrop, his encounters with Hindu nationalism appear oddly anticlimactic. When The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995) mocked late Shiv Sena founder Bal Thackeray and caricatured Hindu figures, the feared Hindutva explosion never arrived. Thackeray responded with a shrug, joking that his secretary could read the book for him. There was no fatwa, no bounty, no transnational hunt for the author’s life.

Even today, when one mocks Hindu gods and goddesses or some revered historical figure, the case is usually closed with an apology. Consider the reverse in an Islamist case, where satire has repeatedly invited massacre rather than mediation. Charlie Hebdo’s cartoonists were not met with Kalashnikovs while Danish cartoonists were forced to live under permanent guard.

Theo van Gogh was murdered on an Amsterdam street for a short film critical of Islam; the novelist Taslima Nasreen was driven into exile; the Bangladeshi-American writer Avijit Roy was hacked to death at a book fair; teachers in France have been beheaded for showing cartoons in classrooms by Islamists. Yet Rushdie now appears more animated by the perceived dangers of Hindutva than by the ideology that quite literally took his eye. Critics in India have not missed the irony. It only proves that it is safer to attack Hindu nationalism in Western liberal circles, where such criticism is applauded than to dwell too insistently on Islamist intolerance, which makes polite company uncomfortable. Rushdie, after all, knows the cost of offending Islamism and knows equally well that Hindu outrage rarely comes with knives.

By contrast, India’s cultural controversies - from M.F. Husain’s nudes to Wendy Doniger’s scholarship, from stage plays to social-media provocations - have unfolded within courts, and television studios. They have not ended in morgues.

To frame Hindu nationalism as the great menace of his time, while treating Islamism as a settled problem of the past, is to flatten history and misread the present. The jihadist impulse that hunted him has not vanished. To downplay that fact while warning solemnly of saffron authoritarianism speaks of his monumental double-standards or, perhaps, fear of offending Islamists?

A man who embodies the catastrophic consequences of one form of religious absolutism should be wary of relativising it. The question his latest intervention raises is not whether India can withstand criticism, but whether Salman Rushdie can still apply his moral clarity evenly or whether survival has taught him, understandably but regrettably, to choose his targets with care.