After Salman Rushdie withdrew from the Jaipur Literary Festival under threats of an assassination attempt (threats he now believes to have been "invented" by Rajasthan police in a scheme devised to dissuade him from attending), four other writers on the program--Hari Kunzru, Amitava Kumar, Jeet Thayil, and Ruchir Joshi--expressed their solidarity on stage by reading out passages from The Satanic Verses, which is banned in India, to the horror of some conference organizers.
Police have demanded that the organizers turn over recordings of the controversial readings. Yet as Salil Tripathi points out, it is illegal to import the book into India but it is not clearly illegal to possess it or read from it.
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