Rushdie Controversy: Religious Zealotry versus Free Speech/Liberty

British-era laws against insulting religion led to the banning of “The Satanic Verses” 30 years ago and continue to exact a high price in the subcontinent today.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-08-18/salman-rushdie-knife-attack-has-roots-in-british-india-not-iran
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/rushdie-attacks-rootslie-in-india-not-iran/2022/08/17/ab89f02c-1e9b-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html
Mihir Sharma notes:
“Section 295A was born out of another controversy, almost a century ago, when an anonymous pamphlet about the Prophet Mohammed led to rioting across undivided India. A judge, who happened to be an Indian Christian, dismissed a case against the publisher because India at the time had no law against insulting religion. In response, the British government and Indian legislators introduced one.
The controversy drew in top political figures of the time. After the publisher was murdered by a carpenter’s son named Ilm Din, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, a supposedly secular lawyer who would go on to found Pakistan, appeared in court to argue that the young killer should be spared the death penalty. After Ilm Din was nonetheless hanged, his graveside eulogy was delivered by the poet Muhammad Iqbal, Pakistan’s founding ideologue. The assassin’s grave in a Lahore cemetery today is loaded with flowers and treated as a national shrine”.