Rushdie attack: Cost of prizing religious identity over defence of liberty

In a piece of dreadful irony, last week's brutal knife attack on Salman Rushdie came just days before the 75th anniversary of the partition of India and Pakistan

As an Indian, I claim Salman Rushdie as one of our own. He is, more than anything else, an Indian author whose writing is shaped by his heritage as a Muslim from the subcontinent, as well as a child of what was once secular, cosmopolitan Bombay (now known as Mumbai). In a piece of dreadful irony, last week’s brutal knife attack on Rushdie came just days before the 75th anniversary of the partition of India and Pakistan — the bloody event at the heart of the novel that first made his name, “Midnight’s Children.”
 

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