In a post on the Wall Street Journal’s India Realtime blog, journalist Tom Wright says at one point:

In the open letter, the signatories said it was impossible to have a literary festival in Kashmir [Link]

I asked him on Twitter as to where the open letter says that. He replied:

the opening graph says you can’t hold a literary festival in the context of kashmir [Link]

Given that he was being specific about the location of the “impossible to hold” claim in the open letter, I wondered for a moment if I was wrong. I checked the first two paragraphs of the open letter I had posted but found no such claim:

A literary festival, by definition, is an event that celebrates the free flow of ideas and opinions. It not only assumes a freedom from fear. It demands a certain independence of mind and spirit. To hold it in a context where some basic fundamental rights are markedly absent, indeed, denied to the population, is to commit a travesty. In fact, as literary and artistic festivals held elsewhere, Israel and Sri Lanka for example, show, such events are sometimes used to falsely assert the existence of basic freedoms, even as they are denied to larger sections of the population.

In Kashmir, with its history of intense repression and brutality, markedly so in the last two decades, a context where deaths in custody, torture, rape, disappearances, curbs and assaults on the press and human rights activists are rife, where thousands of teenagers and even pre-teens have recently been arrested, slapped with FIRs and draconian laws, where infamous laws like the PSA and AFSPA are fully operational, indeed, are the operative principles, where dissent and the expression of political realities is sought to be curbed by brute force, holding such a festival raises those core issues about basic ideals and freedoms. [Link]

So I replied Wright: nowhere does it use the phrase “can’t hold” or the word “impossible”. Please quote from the text.

He had a good excuse:

that’s the tenor of the top of the letter. i wasn’t quoting [Link]

I told him this amounted to misrepresentation, to which he said we’ll have to agree to disagree. I fail to see how he cannot see the misrepresentation even when it’s been pointed out to him, and even when he’s failed to substantiate his reading of the ‘tenor’ of the open letter by a single word from it.

His post was titled “Peer escalates Kashmir LitFest Row”, continuing the practice of blaming the signatories of the open letter, in much the same way as everything in Kashmir is blamed on the Kashmiri. The reference here was to Basharat Peer’s article in The Hindu where he wrote writes:

Before the Harud was talked about in the press, I had conveyed my apprehensions to the organisers — the novelist and festival producer Namita Gokhale and her partners, Teamwork Productions headed by Sanjoy Roy and Sheuli Sethi — and suggested holding the festival independently, without any political connections. They chose otherwise. It thus became impossible for me, as an independent writer, to be part of such an event. If I had decided to attend the festival, given the obvious political connections of Harud’s lead sponsor, then tomorrow I would not be able to say no to an event funded by people connected to other political establishments and ideologies. This was the same reason I stayed away, despite several invitations, from the conferences organised by Ghulam Nabi Fai, the Kashmiri-American lobbyist who turned out to be on the payroll of Pakistan’s Inter Services Agency. [Read the full article]

Despite many such clarifications, the misrepresentation that the signatories of the open letter are to be blamed for the indefinite postponement of the event, and not those who postponed it, continues. In a harrumphing blog post on the Banyan blog of The Economist magazine’s website, Leo Mirani compares the open letter with the boycott call amongst writers for the Galle Literary Festival in Sri Lanka and the decision of a few Indian artists to boycott an art event in Israel. Mirani misses the point that in this case it was not a boycott call.

The appeal for the Galle Literary Festival said:

We believe this is not the right time for prominent international writers like you to give legitimacy to the Sri Lankan government’s suppression of free speech by attending a conference that does not in any way push for greater freedom of expression inside that country. [Link]

In the case of the Harud festival, no such appeal to others was made. Responding to the comparison with Galle, Parvaiz Bukhari writes:

Holding literature festivals in conflict zones or countries that have a record of withholding freedoms from citizens has often been a controversial enterprise, like the Galle Festival in Sri Lanka. A number of globally prominent authors and artists boycotted Galle recently. Equally prominent writers chose to participate after painstakingly and passionately explaining their decisions. The tradition of debate and openness was held high. The Galle festival was not cancelled because of a heightened debate. The debate in the end highlighted with ever more force and clarity the conditions that were being protested by adherents of the boycott. That is where progressive change has a chance. [Read the full article]

From Kafila archives:

• Apoorvanand: Killing poetry and other possibilities of life
• On the Harud Literary Festival, setting the record straight
• Hypocrisy in Any Season: Mridu Rai responds to Rahul Pandita
• An Open Letter on the ‘Harud’ Literary Festival
• A Response from the Harud Literary Festival
• Harud Literature Festival ‘Postponed’