From The Times of India:
“Controversy has erupted over the 24-hour-old, inexplicable, so-called ‘literary award fatwa’ imposed on Salman Rushdie, whose magnificent, multi-national, much-hyped, four-day-old novel on ‘iron mullahs’ and a Kashmiri jihadi was left off the shortlist of the world’s most prestigious, financially lucrative Man Booker literary prize.”
As exciting as it is to see journalism that dispenses with the myth of objectivity altogether, I don’t think failure to make a literary shortlist is quite the same as a worldwide call for assassination, especially since the Booker chair is on record as believing Shalimar the Clown is Rushdie “writing at his best.” (The review’s in London’s Evening Standard, which doesn’t seem to like giving away news on the Internet much.)
Among the other “flabbergasted” reactions in the literary press, Nigel Reynolds takes a calmer view in The Telegraph, noting that, in the UK (as opposed to the U.S.), 2005 “has been hailed as one of the best years for fiction in a long time.” So it’s not as if Rushdie was getting excluded in order to celebrate, say, five unknown women from London.