Salman Rushdie did not want to be the apostle for freedom of expression. He just wanted to tell stories

The attack on the author is a reminder that just as Midnight’s Children put literature from the subcontinent on the world literary map, The Satanic Verses put freedom of expression on the cultural map

What you were is forever who you are. — Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

When literary festival organisers in India baulked at inviting Salman Rushdie, I, like many advocates of freedom of expression, would react with righteous indignation. After the horrific stabbing at Chautauqua, I feel I understand their predicament a bit better. It was not just capitulation to political pressure. Which festival director would want to risk a Chautauqua? Despite all the security, there can still be enough of a gap for a determined 24-year-old with a knife.

That’s not to say that the lesson of Chautauqua is that freedom of expression must play second fiddle. It’s just that freedom of expression versus safety is an unenviable balancing act and one Rushdie himself was increasingly tired of.

In his 1991 address to Columbia University, he described himself as a bubble that floated above and through the world, deprived of reality, reducing him to an abstraction. “For many people I’ve ceased to be a human being. I’ve become an issue, a bother, ‘an affair’.”

Thirty years after that speech, Rushdie lying grievously injured in a pool of blood, reminded the world that he is both an issue  and a human being. The two are not mutually exclusive.

The 75th anniversary of India’s independence should have been the time to revisit Rushdie’s  Midnight’s Children. Instead, a young man who was not even born when the fatwa was issued has dragged us back into  The Satanic Verses.

Some have cautioned against using the stabbing to tar Muslims generally, reminding us that fundamentalists come in all garbs. Others have stressed the need to stand up even more resolutely for freedom of expression. There’s been hand-wringing about how to change the hearts and minds of the brainwashed while a hardline Iranian paper said the hand of Rushdie’s attacker must be kissed.