Nitin Sawney, Salman Ahmad (Junoon Unplugged), Shye Ben Tzur, Rajasthan Roots, Paban Das Baul and others in evening concerts over the five days. The special theme was the oral tradition, in India and elsewhere. 2010 The 2010 festival had about 30,000 attendees and 172 authors/speakers, including Geoff Dyer, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Jamaica Kincaid, Niall Ferguson, Vikram Chandra and Hemant Shesh. 2011 The 2011 festival had 226 writers like Hemant Shesh, Prasoon Joshi, Javed Akhtar, Gulzar /speakers, including Nobel-winners J. M. Coetzee and Orhan Pamuk. 2012 The 2012 festival was held from 20 to 24 January, with the talk-show host Oprah Winfrey and author Salman Rushdie among the names announced in advance. Rushdie later cancelled, and indeed cancelled his complete tour of India, citing possible threats to his life as the primary reason. Rushdie investigated police reports that hitmen had been hired to assassinate him and implied that the police might have exaggerated the potential danger. Police said that Ruchir Joshi, Jeet Thayil, Hari Kunzru and Amitava Kumar fled Jaipur on the advice of officials at the Jaipur Literature Festival after reading excerpts from The Satanic Verses, which is banned in India. Kunzru later wrote, "Our intention was not to offend anyone's religious sensibilities, but to give a voice to a writer who had been silenced by a death threat". A proposed video link session between Rushdie and the Jaipur Literature Festival ran into difficulty after the government pressured the festival to stop it. Rushdie expressed disappointment "on behalf of India", "an India in which religious extremists can prevent free expression of ideas at a literary festival, in which the politicians are too, let's say, in bed with those groups...for narrow electoral reasons, in which the police forces are unable to secure venues against demonstrators even when they know the demonstration is on its way". The Chairman of the Press Council of India and former judge of the Supreme Court Markandey Katju said that although he was "not in favour of religious obscurantism", he found Rushdie a "poor" and "substandard writer" and the focus on him detracting from more fundamental issues of "colonial inferiority complex" among educated Indians and what a literary mission could be about. Scottish novelist Allan Massie wrote, "The response to words should be words and words in the form of argument, not abuse". Peter Florence, Director, Hay Festivals, said the whole affair showed the importance of