In 2012, Salman Rushdie was prevented from participating at a literature festival for having written The Satanic Verses two decades earlier. In 2015, Hindu Mahasabha leader Kamlesh Tiwari was arrested and detained under the draconian National Security Act by a ‘secular and liberal’ Samajwadi Party government for making ‘derogatory remarks’ about the prophet of Islam. In 2019, Kamlesh Tiwari was murdered, and those who conspired to kill him confessed that their motive had been to avenge what Tiwari had said.
