'What gives me credibility is that I say what I think'

In 1986-87 were you already feeling the rumblings of jihad?
The insurgency in Kashmir began less than 18 months after that meeting. There was this negative electricity in the air.
The strange thing was when I would come back to Delhi and Bombay and talk to people, writers, media people, they resisted the information. It's the only time in my life people would accuse me of being a Muslim communalist.
Was it hard to write about Kashmir?
It's a place I feel a deep connection to.Partly because my family is mostly Kashmiri. Yes, it's always difficult to write tragedy. I would get up on certain days and wish I could change the story. Let these things not happen to people I care about. Yes, it was very painful.
In a post-9/11 world people feel they have no control of their destiny. Yet your character Shalimar meticulously controls his destiny, plotting his journey from a village in Kashmir to an ambassador's doorstep in Los Angeles.
Actually you are right. Because of events like the 9/11 attacks we have all become aware of how our lives can be dramatically changed by acts over which we have absolutely no control. But that subject���do we make our lives or do our lives makes us���is one of the great subjects of literature, always has been.
Even in Midnight's Children, Saleem asks himself that question and the novel asks us that question about him. He has this comic idea that the whole of history is his fault but as we read the book it becomes clear to us he may in fact be a victim. In this book the characters, too, do struggle to be in charge of their fates.
Shalimar becomes almost manically determined that his life will be the thing he has chosen for it to be. His unfaithful wife Boonyi seizes what she thought was an opportunity to reshape her life���that is to decamp with the American ambassador from this tiny village of limited opportunity and allow herself the possibility of dancing on a big stage.
Max himself has repeatedly reshaped his life. He chooses to leave Europe and reinvent himself as an American. In a way, the choices he makes are in the end the things that cut him down.
You have said about this book that the love story came first, not the terrorism. Can you explain?
What really came first was this image of this little group of people caught in between this mixture of love and death. This triangle���the dead man, his killer, the dead man's illegitimate daughter, the product of the illicit union between the dead man and his killer's wife. I learned to trust them and follow where they led. And where they led was to a very large canvas.
Shalimar begins with Mercutio's quote from Romeo and Juliet���A plague on both their houses. Did you feel a pressure to be just as harsh on Pakistani-trained Islamic radicals as the Indian army?
No, that's what I genuinely think. Islamic radicalism has been active in Kashmir for the last 20 to 25 years. The Indian army has been active there for the last 60 years. Part of the tragedy of Kashmir is they got screwed from both sides���first by the Indian army, and then the jihadis���and they got crushed in the middle.
The original nationalist movement in Kashmir was not jihadist. Its slogan was 'Kashmir for the Kashmiris'. But that essentially secular movement was hijacked by the radicals.
To this day you find jihadist groups targetting moderate Kashmiri leaders for assassination in order to polarise the situation. Their cause is served by polarisation. They don't want the middle ground.
But should you expel extremist leaders just for inciting hatred, in the way Tony Blair wants? You once said, 'What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.'
Tony Blair is, for many of us, one of the great disappointments of our lives. I don't trust Blair and his new laws further than I can throw them. But I have to say I would not grieve at all about the expulsion of some of these Londonistan figures.
Taking off my liberal hat for a moment, to throw out some of these firebrand mullahs who have been working up kids like these kids who blew themselves up (on July 7), frankly I wouldn't give a damn.
But there is a problem when you define offense so broadly that you can kick out anyone whose face you don't like. And given the authoritarian nature of the government, one has to be very, very worried.
What kind of reformation in Islam are you talking about in the face of this firebrand extremism?
In a way maybe the use of the word reformation was wrong. The Christian reformation was a Puritan movement and that would be a movement in the wrong direction. I was talking about a reform movement to reclaim Islam from the radicals. Islamic radicalism had much less power 30 years ago.
I think back to my grandfather, who was an extremely devout Muslim and went on the Haj to Mecca, but nevertheless was extremely open-minded and tolerant. That's why I dedicate the book to him. Even though he was devout and I am not religious, he was a kind of a model.
Can a call for reform have legitimacy coming from a writer whose work millions consider blasphemous?
You are right. There are many who will never listen to anything I say because it's me saying it. That's fair enough. I am not asking to lead anything. I am not asking to even be a part of anything.
What I am saying is if something like this does not happen, the danger is that all Muslims will begin to seem as if they are complying with the activities of the radicals.
If there isn't a strong rejectionist voice, many people, particularly in the diaspora where Muslims are in the minority, will readily come to think that's what you secretly think. That would be catastrophic.
But standing up to extremism is hard. In 1990 you yourself published a statement of remorse.
There were enormous pressures on me, including government pressure. But I regretted doing it. I felt the thing that gives me credibility is I say exactly what I think. And if I compromise that I lose myself. So I tried rapidly to un-say it. But I think there are many voices out there now beginning to speak up.
You say you are drawn more and more to themes of "worlds in collision". What do you mean?
When I wrote Midnight's Children I didn't think like this. I thought I was writing about India and Pakistan and that was more than enough. As the world has gone on in this last quarter century, it has shrunk.
Part of that is communication, part of that is mass migration, part of that is economic globalisation, and yes, part of that is international terrorism. For a combination of all these reasons, our societies in different parts of the world bleed into each other, sometimes literally, to a much greater degree than was ever the case.
So my stories have turned into these strange stories where to understand one bit of the world you have to understand another bit of the world. In a way it goes against the grain of the novel. The novel has something provincial in its nature.
The novel wants to be put in a certain small town with a couple of merchants and an unfaithful wife and tell the story. But now the world ain't like that. Now you must put together a story that operates in many cultures and you must put those pieces of the jigsaw together.