Salman Rushdie, the man who told stories about India

At the Hay Festival in 2016. Photo: Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado). CC BY-SA 3.0

The day that Salman Rushdie was stabbed in Chautauqua, in upstate New York, an openDemocracy piece on India-Pakistan at 75 quoted the novelist.

“The growing likeness,” between India and Pakistan, the piece said, “has struck others, not least Salman Rushdie, whose acclaimed allegorical novel ‘Midnight’s Children’ (1981) centred on India and Pakistan’s inextricably linked fates. At a seminar at Brown University in the US last November, Rushdie noted that in these past seven decades, neither country had fared well. “I used to think that India had got things right to a degree that Pakistan had not,” said Rushdie. “I find it hard to believe that any more — not because of the improvement of Pakistan, but because of the deterioration of India.”

Mr Rushdie features in almost every story about India. Pakistan, not so much.

One might wonder why. After all, though Mr Rushdie was born in Bombay to parents of Kashmiri ethnici…