Was Rushdie stabbed in the back by Jain?

 25 years ago Salman Rushdie, currently in hospital having survived a Hezbollah inspired assassination attempt, spoke as follows to India Today-

The narrator of Midnight's Children describes it (independent India) as a kind of collective fantasy.

Rushdie studied History at Cambridge. He should have known that India was admitted to the League of Nations in 1919. The thing was a de jure reality, not a fantasy. Furthermore, from 1917 onward, Britain was committed to 'responsible' (which increasingly meant representative) government in India. One may say that the British created India at some date in the early nineteenth century. But Warren Hastings was simultaneously saying that 'the day was not distant' when the only relationship between Britain and India would be one of friendship and commercial and cultural exchange. Indians may have had different plans for the Indian polity. But a plan is not a fantasy. One may say 'Gandhi was a fantasist' but Gandhi's plan was never adopted by the INC though some lip service was paid to khadi and nai taleem and so forth.  

I suppose what he - or I, through him - was saying was that there never had been a political entity called India until 1947.

Yes there had. The 1833 Government of India act had specified a political and juristic entity called India which already existed de facto. There had been a succession of such acts. Burma was split off by the 1935 Act which gave India provincial autonomy. There was a provision for a Federal Government at the Center. But the Indians could not agree to establish this.  

The thing that became independent had never previously existed,

It had existed in statute law and international law since at least 1833 

except that there had been an area, a zone called India.

There was never any such zone. There were the 'Indies' but the West Indies were on the other side of the world from the East Indies.  

So it struck me that what was coming into being, this idea of a nation-state, was an invention.

If so, it dates back to the invention of the plough.  

It was an invention of the nationalist movement.

Was there a nationalist movement in 1833? Raja Ram Mohun Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore were lobbying Westminster to permit unrestricted European settlement in India. Why? They believed only the Brits could save the Bengali Hindu from Muslim tyranny.  

There wasn't much of a nationalist movement when A.O Hume and others created the INC. The plain fact is that economic and administrative considerations militate for the creation of nation states wherever possible. In India, this possibility was turned into a successful and enduring reality. The question was whether Muslim majority areas would consider themselves Indian or whether they would see themselves as a nation apart. They chose to go their own way. 

Rushdie himself left India and, via Britain, went to Pakistan where he was briefly employed by Pakistani TV. 

Pakistan was certainly an invention. It wasn't successful because the (then) more populous East Wing broke away. 

And a very successful invention.

One could argue that nation-states are that kind of collective fantasies.

If one were a cretin- sure. Otherwise the thing is foolish. Nation states have always existed. Egypt has been around for at least 5000 years. We may say 'God is a collective fantasy. There is no scientific proof that God exists'. But religious belief is a matter of faith not fantasy. Wanking may involve fantasizing. Worship does not.  

Very similar things happened with the unification of Italy, with the unification of Germany.

Nonsense! Wars were fought to secure Italian and German unification.  

The history of India is a history of independent nation-states.

No it isn't. It is a history of kingdoms and Empires of fluctuating size and authority with diverse populations. 

It is a history of Oudh or Bengal

ruled by foreign Princes belonging to minority religious sects 

or Maratha kingdoms.

Marathas ruled plenty of non-Maratha territory 

All those independent histories agreed to collectivise themselves into the idea of the nation of India.

Only if they were predominantly Hindu and even then only because there was a fear of Muslim (or, later, Communist) 'salami' tactics. Hindus had to hang together otherwise, as Tagore warned, they would once again fall prey to the more cohesive and much more bellicose Muslims or Christians.  

In the case of Pakistan, it was less successful. Pakistan was under-imagined. It did not survive as a nation-state.

It survived as a truncated nation-state. Its Army appears powerful enough to crush the Baluchis. Sindhi separatism seems to have disappeared. On the other hand, if the Taliban in Afghanistan turns hostile, it may face recurring problems in Swat and Waziristan and so forth.  

If you ask people in general, they would have absolutely no problem with the idea of India at all.

If they are Hindu- sure.  

I think, in a way, the strength of the nationalist idea is shown by its ability to survive the extraordinary stresses that it was placed under.

What stresses? India's strength lies in the fact that it can do torture and extra-judicial killing on an industrial scale when it gets a bit stressed. But this is not a function of nationalist sentiment. 

I think the stresses of things like communalism, the high degree of public corruption, of regional rivalries, of the tension between the Centre and the states, the external pressures of bad relations with Pakistan - these are colossal pressures which any state could be forgiven for being damaged by.

Not if those pressures are self-generated. Gandhi, in 1939, said Congress was a High Caste Hindu party which is why it would be very nice and sweet and would always obey the commands of the Ahimsa fairy. But everybody knew it was corrupt. Under Nehru, economic power was centralized thus creating 'tension' between the Centre and the States. This got worse under Indira who undermined regional satraps. 

I think the thing to say about the success of the idea is that it remains an idea though people might not find it very easy to give a simple definition of it.

But this idea had received a precise legal definition since at least 1833! The definition of India is provided for us by International Law.  

But that it does exist and that it is something to which people feel they belong, I think is now the case.

Unless, like Rushdie. they have managed to get a British or American passport  or, better yet, both. 

That it survives these stresses is an indication of the strength of it.

Or an indication that those 'stresses' were inconsequential.  

I'm not interested in an idealised, romantic vision of India.

Indians are. They have to live there. I'm interested in idealised romantic vision of my g.f. because if I see her as other people do then I won't be able to get an erection and she will stop cooking for me.  

I know it is the great pitfall of the exile.

An emigrant is not an exile any more than a cow which moves to where the grass is greener.  

So you know for me, always, the issue of writing about India has been not to write as an outsider.

The only 'issue' when it comes to writing is whether you can make money doing so. If not, then you may as well be an actual insider. 

On the other hand, evidently something has changed in the last 10 years, which is that as a result of various circumstances,

the Iranian fatwa 

I've not been able to return.

Rushdie should have been safe in Amrika. Sadly, a lot of Amrikans be kray-kray.  

All I can say is that I have felt it as the most profound loss and I still do. There have been many losses in this last decade but the loss of the easy return to India has been for me an absolute anguish, an inescapable anguish. I feel as if I've lost a limb. I am very anxious to bring that period to an end.

Vajpayee put that period to an end for Rusdhie. India, it turned out, wasn't keen on Islamic terrorism.  

I do think that one of the most interesting phenomena for India as a country is the phenomenon of the Indian Diaspora.

Rushdie belongs to the Pakistani diaspora. He and Tariq Ali had a soft spot for India because it wasn't Pakistan. But as  Dr. Taslima Nasrin discovered, it wasn't that different when it comes to containing large numbers of fanatics eager to behead 'blasphemers' and 'apostates'. 

I often think Indians-Indian Indians - find that very hard to understand. In England, when people call themselves British Indian, they mean both halves of that. And yet, what it means to be a British Indian is very alien to an Indian Indian.

Nonsense. We understand by the term 'British Indian' that you clean toilets at Heathrow and then come home on holiday pretending you are a big shot. On the other hand Indian Americans are respected. They are either Doctors or techies who will become billionaires once their stock vests.  

The same is true in the Caribbean, in Africa, in Canada, in the United States, and so on. The thing that has interested me is that there are now many, many ways of being something which you can legitimately call an Indian.

This is nonsense. There is only one legitimate way of calling an Indian an Indian. Is he or she a citizen of India? Unlike Pakistan, India does not permit dual nationality.  

Being an Indian in India is just one of those ways.

You can also be an NRI. At one time it was believed that 'Overseas Citizenship of India' (OCI) would be just as good as dual nationality but this does not appear to be the case.  

On the other hand, you can be an American while claiming to be 'asli desi' because your name is Hiawatha. 

The forces of disintegration are always there. I think in every society there is the tension between the forces that bring it together and the forces that pull it apart. I'm worried above all, of the communal issue because half a century is no time at all in the eye of history, and half a century ago something of colossally horrible proportions took place. The fact that it hasn't happened for 50 years on quite the same scale means nothing. It could still happen tomorrow.

But it would not affect the Hindu majority. That is the sad but inescapable truth.  

One of the things that I remember very vividly, being there 10 years ago at about the time of the killings that took place in Assam, is discussing this with good friends and fellow writers. And I remember somebody said to me, until we understand that we are capable of these things, we can't begin to move beyond them.

Gandhi found that Congress leaders in Bihar were very capable of killing innocent Muslims. A year after the Nellie massacre, intellectuals in Delhi could see that all sorts of people- including Bangladeshi Muslims- were more than capable of slaughtering Sikhs who, it must be said, are no slouches in that department.  

Because it's a very easy response to atrocities to say: oh those terrible people did that, and we are not like that. I think the difficult response is to accept we are capable of that, the thing that happened there could also, in certain circumstances, be something that we were able to perpetrate. The civilising influence is what prevents most of us from giving vent to those terrible urges. Those urges are part of humanity as well as the more civilised urges.

Rushdie supported the 'War on Terror' which was a gift to Iran. Was he shocked by Abu Ghraib? The fact is America has always led the world in genocide and fucking over darker complexioned peeps. That's why everybody wants to move there.  

Of course, I fear in India the recurrence of communalist or regionalist inter-community violence.

But it was in America that Rushdie got stabbed.  

I fear the long-term damage to a democracy that can be done by mass corruption.

Corruption represents short term damage. Medium to long term, the corrupt are disintermediated.  

I think corruption is in a way a subversion of democracy

of a bureaucracy- sure. But all sorts of regimes are dependent on bureaucracy.  

and the commonplace view in India is that corruption is everywhere. In a sense, you could say, that is not a democratic society.

Only in the sense that India is not a democracy coz only White peeps be democratic.  

If money, favour and privilege is what makes the place work, then that's not a democracy.

Yes it is if the guys currently running things can be booted out by voters a couple of years down the line.  

At least it runs the danger of being no longer able to call itself a democracy.

North Korea calls itself a democracy. I used to call myself the Democratic Republic of Iyerland. Sadly, I got drunk and seceded from myself to establish the not-demo-fucking-cratic-at-all Galactic Empire of Iyerland. Now I just call myself a leprechaun.  

I was struck by a remarkable paradox: that, in a country created by the Congress's nationalist campaign,

India already existed. A British ICS officer helped create the Indian National Congress.  

the well-being of the people might now require that all nationalist rhetoric be abandoned. —Essay (1987)

The well-being of the people required getting rid of a corrupt, incompetent, dynasty. Nationalist rhetoric enabled the BJP to replace a party run by a lady from Italy.  

What was happening, I thought, was that people were trying to seize control of that rhetoric. That is to say, special interest groups - you could say Hindus are a very large special interest group.

Rushdie does not want the Hindu majority to run India. Tough titty.  

If any group inside such a complex and many-faceted country tries to define the nation exclusively in its own terms, then it begins to create terrible stresses.

Not if they are more than 80 percent of the population. Minorities, however, may find things pretty stressful.  

I do think that the kind of attempt to define India in Hindu terms is worrying for that reason. It creates backlashes,

which trigger much much bigger backlashes.  

it creates polarisations,

Who created the polarization which resulted in Rushdie's stabbing?  

and it creates the risk of more upheaval. Partly, I am saying this as a kind of objective observer, but nobody is an objective observer.

I come from an Indian minority,

But became part of the Pakistani majority by moving there.  

I no doubt have a minority perspective. I can't ignore that and nor would I wish to. Partly also I am speaking temperamentally. That is to say, the kind of religious language in politics is something I find temperamentally unpleasant. I don't like people who do that, whether they be sectarians in Northern Ireland or India.

Some people who don't like Rushdie stick knives into him. But they tend to belong to his ancestral religion.  

I believe in, if possible, separating one's personal spiritual needs and aspirations from the way in which a country is run.

More particularly if you have run away very far from that country and are in fact barred from visiting it.  

I think in those countries where that separation has not taken place, one can see all kinds of distortions of social and ordinary life which are unpleasant.

Rushdie got knifed in a country where social and ordinary life features school shootings and mall shootings and a large section of the population stockpiling automatic weapons for the Zombie apocalypse. 

Iran is an obvious example. The country in which that kind of separation has completely broken down.

For something to 'break down', it has to exist in the first place. The Shah's regime wasn't big on 'separation of the powers' was it?  

The mosque at Ayodhya was destroyed. Alphabet-soupists, 'fanatics', or, alternatively, 'devout liberators of the sacred site' (delete according to taste) swarmed over the seventeenth-century Babri Masjid and tore it apart with their bare hands, with their teeth, with the elemental power of what Sir VS. Naipaul has called their 'awakening to history'. —The Moor's Last Sigh

They were avenging the deaths of pilgrims at the hands of 'Mullah' Mulayam Singh Yadav. That strategy paid off. Yogi just beat the pants off Mulayam's son.  

Where Naipaul is right, although I don't share his conclusions about it, but I think where he is right, is in saying that this is a great historical moment.

Vajpayee didn't pick up the ball and run with it. That's why the RSS wanted Advani to take over.  

One reason why the 50th anniversary is interesting is that it does seem to represent the end of the first age and the beginning of a second age.

The first age ended in 1972 when Indira won a war and erased Nehru's humiliation. The second ended in 1997 which was about the time when the BJP began to appear a possible rival for the INC. The third age ended in 2022 with Congress and the Left (save in Kerala) on the way to annihilation. But AAP has won Punjab. Maybe the new party which Prashant Kishore is setting up in Bihar will succeed and give a template for other such citizen led initiatives. Meanwhile Nitish looks set to give Modi a run for his money in 2024. (I'm kidding. Nitish is useless) Whatever direction India is headed in, it is a more democratic one where Cambridge educated ninnies are ignored.  

And to that extent that is true now, if someone was born today, they would be born into a very different set of cultural assumptions and hopes than somebody born 50 years ago.

Also, sex has changed- a lot. Rimming is compulsory if you are under 30. Or so I have been told. 

We were entirely sold on the Nehru-Gandhi kind of plan.

There was no Nehru-Gandhi plan. Why not speak of the Tolstoy-Lenin plan?  

We grew up and that was the portrait of the nation we had hung on our wall, and to the extent that you never entirely lose those formative ideas, that's still the picture of the country I've got hung on my wall.

But daddy moved the family to Pakistan. Sonny boy, quite sensibly, decided to stay in Britain where his USP was being posher than the Queen's tits.  

But it's clear that for somebody being born now, they are being born into a very different country.

Unless their parents didn't escape India in which case they were born in the same country. 

I also think - to take the Naipaul point on - what would happen if the BJP were to form a government. Well, what I would like to think is that in order for the BJP or anybody of that persuasion to form a government, they would have had to change. There is even some kind of suggestion that it may even be happening a little bit because they are intelligent people. They understand their weaknesses as well as their strengths. Clearly, for a Hinduist party to become the government of the country, is not at all unlikely.

Congress was the ultimate Hinduist party. Rushdie believed that Nehru decided things based on astrological advise. Indira, of course, had her own personal Yogi who improved her health with his dick.  

So, I think, one does have to engage with that in the same way as many people in this country who, like myself, were not remotely in tune with the Thatcherite revolution but had to engage with it because it was in fact happening, and kept winning elections, and the world was not going to go back. So, of course, both people inside the Hindu political enterprise and people outside it will have to shift. I am optimistic about India's ability to force those changes that are necessary because I do believe it is not fundamentally an intolerant country and will not fundamentally accept intolerant politics.

Unless, fundamentally, it does because Rushdie's opinions don't matter in the slightest to anybody. 

On the other hand, there has to be a reckoning with the fact that these are ideas which are gaining in popularity. I'll tell you where I would draw the line myself. I think there was a great historical mistake made in Europe about the Nazi party. People attempted to see whether they could live with it and discovered very rapidly that was a mistake, that appeasement was a great historical mistake.

But that mistake only arose because, it turned out, Europe could not live with a Communist party holding power in Moscow and encouraging Communist Parties elsewhere to take power by hook or crook. The upshot of the Second World War was that the West paid in blood and treasure for Moscow to control more of Europe than ever before.  

So, it seems to me, the question is: What do we make of this political enterprise? Is it fundamentally democratic or fundamentally anti-democratic? If democratic, then we must all learn to make the best of it. If anti-democratic, then we must fight it very hard.

From Britain or America- sure.  

What happened in India happened before the book (The Satanic Verses) had actually entered. It happened because of an article in INDIA TODAY which, I must say, I thought was an irresponsibly written article. Because it was written by somebody who, as a friend, asked me for an early copy of the book, and then presented that book in the most inflammatory sort of way. I know, because people who became active in the campaign against the book, said that they had based their views on INDIA TODAY's article. That's just history and fact.

Presumably this was Madhu Jain's article in Sept. 1988. The problem here is that Penguin India had already decided not to publish the book under its own imprint on advise from Khushwant Singh who was a barrister before becoming one of the foremost men of letters in India.  Khushwant had read the typescript. He had warned Penguin's H.O which didn't listen because they thought Rushdie- as a Muslim- must know what he could get away with. But Khushwant was bound to repeat his opinion once the book itself came out. Thus Jain didn't really stab Rushdie in the back. The fellow was so deracinated and ignorant that he made himself a target for any zealot with a knife. Twenty five years later, some basement-dwelling loser has seized his opportunity for wealth and fame. Presumably it will be his dad back in Lebanon who will get the money. But sonny boy will be out of prison in ten years time, if not sooner under a prisoner exchange, and there will be four beautiful virgins waiting for him. 

This was one of the things that disappointed me, that after a lifetime of having written from a certain sensibility, and a certain point of view, I would have expected people in India to know about it since it was all entirely about India.

But not an India, Indians recognized. It was a fairy-land where it was 'absurd that a book could cause a riot'.  

It was written from a deep sense of connection and affection for India.

Those Rushdie hates and satirizes do well. God protect you if he professes affection for you. 

I would have expected that I had some money in the bank. That is to say, if Salman Rushdie writes any book, then we know who he is.

A prancing ninny.  

He is not some idiot who just arrived from nowhere shouting abuse.

No. He was an idiot who Cambridge trained to hurl abuse.  

This is somebody whose work, whose opinions, whose lectures and whose stories we know.

and know to be shit.  

I would have hoped that my work would have been judged in the context of what people already knew about me.

I thought Rushdie would go down an Akhbari Sufi path. His first book was titled Grimus (Simurgh spelled backward) and his second featured a parliament of kids rather than birds.  

Instead, it seemed as if everything I had been in my life up to that point, suddenly vanished out of the window and this other Rushdie was invented who was this complete bastard who had done this terrible thing.

His ex-wife has described this other Rushdie who is a complete bastard.  

There did not seem to be any attempt to correct that or to combat that.

Because Rushdie didn't play the Kashmir card and say 'I'm being persecuted for drawing attention to the plight of the Valley'.  

I was surprised and disappointed it did not. It didn't happen here either. It didn't happen anywhere in the world. It was as if the force of history, the force of a historical event was so huge that it erases all that goes before it.

The force of history is the power of hysteresis or path-dependence. This is annulled by 'ergodic' economic forces. Rushdie thought he could make money by distorting history. He did in fact do so. But everything comes at a price. 

Just recently, I surprised myself by turning down a lucrative proposition which, however, offended against my moral code as a socioproctologist. I received an email offering me a substantial sum of money in return to nude pictures of myself of a suggestive type. I was tempted- I admit. But I refused. Why? Well, if women around the world had access to such pictures they would pleasure themselves so incessantly that they would cease to be economically productive. Civilization would collapse. I'd be richer by hundreds of pounds but the world would have been ruined. That's why I turned down the offer which, I may mention, came from a very wealthy Nigerian Princess who needed my Bank Account details so as to transfer the money.

The negative response to The Satanic Verses - let us remember that there was also a positive response - was such that it erased my personality and put in its place some other guy who I didn't recognise at all. Anybody who knows anything about these countries - and I do know something about these countries - knows that every cheap politician can put a demonstration in the streets in five minutes.

But there were big demonstrations- indeed, there was an attack on Parliament- in Britain itself.  

That doesn't represent in any sense the people's will. It represents a certain kind of political structure, political organisation. It doesn't represent truth.

Whereas Rushdie does- right?  

But I always believed - I still believe - that India would come back. I never believed that the loss of India was forever. Because India is not Iran, it's not even Pakistan, and I thought good sense will prevail in India because that's my life experience of Indian people and of the place.

Vajpayee let Rushdie back into India. We don't care greatly about him. Why? Because India is overwhelmingly Hindu. Till that changes, liberal Muslims are safe enough. 

Post Script.

Rushdie offered these thoughts to Scroll.in on India's 75th Independence anniversary. They were published after he was stabbed. 

Then, in the First Age of Hindustan Hamara,

Hundreds of thousands of Muslims were massacred- in retaliation, it is true, but massacred nonetheless. Millions more migrated in fear. 

our India, we celebrated one another’s festivals,

Muslims were constantly doing Durga Puja- right? Gandhiji was famous for eating plate after plate of mutton biryani to celebrate Eidh.  

and believed, or almost believed, that all of the land’s multifariousness belonged to all of us.

Rushdie's daddy- like thousands of others being harassed by the Custodian of Evacuee property- realized India didn't belong to its erstwhile Muslim rulers. But Pakistan did. That's where he resettled his family.  

Rushdie himself was barred from India for about ten years after Satanic Verses. 

Now that dream of fellowship and liberty is dead, or close to death.

Rushdie was close to death after being stabbed. God alone knows which dreamland he was living in to attend a public event without an ex-fucking-Mossad body-guard to protect him.  

A shadow lies upon the country we loved so deeply.

A shadow lay upon Rushdie. The guy hadn't noticed the uptick in blasphemy killings. He truly was as stupid as shit.  

Hindustan isn’t hamara any more.

It stopped being Rushdie's when he acquired British citizenship as a boy.  

The Ruling Ring – one might say – has been forged in the fire of an Indian Mount Doom.

One might say this if one dealt only in facile cliches.  Still, it is good to know that Rushdie- atheist though he now claims to be- is still Muslim enough to consider Hinduism to be evil and to have a 'Dark Lord'. 

Can any new fellowship be created to stand against it?

The 'sar tan se juda' gang could be called a fellowship. Where Hindus are in the majority it will fail. But where Muslims are the majority Taseers will be shot. It appears, in Christian America, even Rushdies are not safe. The smart thing to do is to get an ex-Mossad minder. But Rushdie was never smart.