Just before the celebrations of India’s 75th Independence Day were to begin over the weekend, its self-named midnight’s child was stabbed in the neck at an event in upstate New York. Both the location and the context are deeply ironic. Salman Rushdie was at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York, a notoriously peaceful place celebrating the arts, for a “discussion of the United States as an asylum for writers and other artists in exile and as a home for freedom of creative expression”. The shocked and disappointed creative community and the public in the US and India are essentially asking one question: “Is nothing sacred?”
Not any more. Social media has closed the gap between the public and the figures it venerates. Verbal violence directed against them has become commonplace, and perhaps physical violence is just a logical step away, much easier to contemplate than in the days when an unreasonably angry man had to seek out a grassy knoll. Perhaps security details should be much more careful than they have been. In Rushdie’s case, the New York Police Department (NYPD) has clearly been very careless.