A newspaper vendor walks past an advertisement hoarding outside the venue of the annual Literature Festival in Jaipur on 22 January 2012 (Reuters)

By  Zainab Iqbal, Azad Essa / Middle East Eye

The Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) is normalising Hindutva in the United States, activists and writers have told Middle East Eye, following revelations that a leader from India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would be participating at this year’s JLF events in New York City.

As of Tuesday morning, at least three panellists, including authors Marie Brenner and Amy Waldman, had reportedly withdrawn from the JLF following calls from activists and writers to boycott the event over the presence of Shazia Ilmi, a national spokesperson for the BJP.

The JLF is the world’s largest free literature festival and holds events outside of India such as the one in New York from 12-14 September.

Brenner and Waldman have not replied to MEE’s request for comment, while festival organisers have refused to divulge if panellists had withdrawn. However, whereas Brenner and Waldman are still listed as speakers on the festival website, as of Tuesday they were no longer on the programme.

Teamwork Arts, the producer of JLF New York,  wouldn’t reveal to MEE whether anyone had pulled out, but they said: “JLF celebrates the written word and ideas and is representative of diverse views and thoughts.”

British-Indian author Aatish Taseer told MEE that he knew at least three people had pulled out of the festival. Taseer said the writers had decided not to make public statements because “they have relationships with people in the festival”.

”They’re afraid to make a political statement,” Taseer said.

Taseer, whose overseas citizenship of India was revoked in 2019 – shortly after he published an article criticising Indian PM Narendra Modi – said that many panellists were duped into believing they were attending a festival with “respectable, intellectual people with bodies of work behind them”.

He said that South Asian activists and writers more knowledgeable about the current political climate in India had to be mobilised to explain to participants that “these are full-on right-wing ideologues, including card-holding members of the BJP”.

“These people who are appearing from the New York side who are liberals would never be caught dead with these [BJP] people,” he said. “So it’s a really, really insidious and sly thing that the JLF leaders have done.”

This story was originally published in middleeasteye.net . Read the full story here