The acclaimed author, who is publishing a long-awaited memoir of his decade in hiding from a murderous fatwa, finds himself threatened once more by fanatics over The Satanic Verses

Following several days of rumour, it was confirmed last week that Salman Rushdie had cancelled his appearance at the Jaipur Literature festival, the largest and most prestigious literary gathering in Asia. Rushdie explained his decision on Twitter: "I was told bombay mafia don issued weapons to 2 hitmen to 'eliminate' me. Will do video link instead."

Who can blame him? There's nothing like being the target of an assassination plot to make a video link seem the more prudent option. When it was mooted that Rushdie would appear at Jaipur, the Darul Uloom Deoband, an influential fundamentalist Islamic seminary in the neighbouring state of Uttar Pradesh, demanded that his visa be withdrawn. But as Rushdie, who was born in India, drily noted, he didn't need a visa.

With the "diplomatic" approach having failed to thwart Rushdie, some of his religious opponents resorted to a more reliable means of censorship: the threat of death. The depressing fact is that almost 23 years after Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa calling for Rushdie's murder, and 13 years after the Iranian government promised to stop supporting his assassination, the novelist is still subject to summary execution orders.

Yet it would be wrong to see this latest example of intimidation as just another case of pious oversensitivity to The Satanic Verses. After all, some clerics are in a permanent state of murderous rage, but that hasn't prevented Rushdie paying several visits to India over the past decade, including an appearance at Jaipur in 2007.

Just as the original British protests against The Satanic Verses in 1988 were the creation of communal politics back in India, so has this latest furore been manufactured to gain local advantage. An election is soon to be held in Uttar Pradesh, where almost 20% of the voters are Muslim. With religious groups threatening to mobilise that kind of voting block, the governing Congress party clearly decided that it was no time to demonstrate spinal fortitude.

"Rushdie has hurt the sentiments of many Indians," announced Chandrabhan Singh, head of the Congress party in Rajasthan, the state containing Jaipur. "He must not be allowed to come to India."

Rushdie was no longer welcome. The novelist Hari Kunzru, who was due to appear with the older writer at Jaipur, called Rushdie's absence "a stain on India's international reputation". There had never been any plan to discuss The Satanic Verses, but as if to prove the absurdity of the rumpus, Kunzru decided to "defy the bigots and shoe-throwers", as well as the organisers of the event, by giving a reading from that supremely misunderstood text. It was more than just symbolic literary resistance because The Satanic Verses is still banned in India, which enjoys the dubious honour of having been the first country to proscribe the book.

This little saga in Jaipur highlights the fact that little has changed in the past three decades. Political cynicism still wears the clothes of multicultural sensitivity and the posture of tolerance continues to genuflect to intolerance.

The irony is that Rushdie is hardly a firebrand these days. If he was once a fearlessly irreverent chronicler of the subcontinent's growing pains, it's been a long time since his novels have openly wrestled with contentious subjects. Even his response to the Jaipur affair has been measured and subdued, as though he were wary of becoming the subject of another fabricated dispute.

The fatwa, and the decade lived under police protection at a series of secret locations, inevitably left their mark on Rushdie and his fiction. Seldom has a writer's creative energy had to withstand such a withering shock. Aside from the pressure of living under a death sentence, Rushdie also had to contend with being cut off from the subcontinent, the teeming reality that gave such vivid purpose to his imagination.

Born and brought up in Mumbai, Rushdie was the only son of a successful textiles businessman who insisted on sending him to England to attend Rugby school. Removed from the frenzy and colour of India's great port, he was "very unhappy" boarding in the English countryside.

After a degree in history at Cambridge, and a stint as an advertising copywriter – he is reputed to have come up with the line "Naughty but nice" for cream cakes – he published his first novel, Grimus, aged 28. It wasn't a great triumph, but six years later his next novel, Midnight's Children, won the Booker prize and ushered in an era of intercontinental post-colonial literature. It was followed by Shame, which was shortlisted for the Booker, and then The Satanic Verses.

It's not that he hid from trouble thereafter, for he has been outspoken in his condemnation of religious fundamentalism and the cultural relativism that excuses it, but his fictive instincts seemed to grow less antagonistic and more elliptical. Novels such as The Moor's Last Sigh and Shalamar the Clown, while bold and complex, lacked the vitality of his earlier work. And not wishing to be defined by Khomeini's decree, and doubtless anxious not to prolong his situation, he also tended to avoid talking about the fatwa in interviews.

"I was always a writer who was interested in politics," he said in 2008, "and then I think I had an overdose of it. Be careful what you wish for. And one of the effects on my sensibility is to make me want to back away from public discourse. I just want to stay at home and write stories and send them out every couple of years. That's why I got into the game, not to be some major public spokesman on political issues."

But later this year, Rushdie will publish a memoir about that lost decade in which he almost OD'd on politics. For the first time, he will explore his experience of the fatwa. It's taken almost a quarter of a century because, he has said: "I needed to have real distance from the material, so that I could approach it like a writing project, not like some Oprah confession. I didn't want it to be a kind of blurt."

The Times has already called it "the most significant literary memoir of the 21st century". Whether or not that proves to be the case, it's certainly the most eagerly awaited book since his friend Martin Amis's Experience in 2000. As bizarre as Khomeini's St Valentine's Day message of hate seemed at the time, the fatwa marked one of the major tectonic shifts in the 20th-century cultural landscape, the reverberations of which continue to be felt across the world.

Rushdie's late friend Christopher Hitchens claimed that he instantly recognised the fatwa as the opening salvo in a new war, one that would be more dramatically confirmed on 11 September 2001. It will be interesting to see what Rushdie actually felt within the claustrophobic belly of history.

Many murders and attempted murders were inspired by the fatwa, but the first casualty was Rushdie's marriage to novelist Marianne Wiggins. The pair split a few months after he was forced into hiding and, while never going into detail, Rushdie has made it clear that the parting was not amicable. The memoir is bound to lift the lid on those painful weeks of shared seclusion.

Wiggins was Rushdie's second wife and he has gone on to add two more, plus a second son, Milan – his eldest son, Zafar, was from his first marriage to the late Clarissa Luard. Although the break-up with Wiggins obviously hurt, Rushdie's most injurious union, at least in terms of public profile, was his three-year marriage to Indian-American actress-model Padma Lakshmi.

Twenty-three years younger, with a pronounced weakness for celebrity spectacle, Lakshmi met Rushdie at the Manhattan launch party of the doomed magazine Talk, an apt title in this case. People did talk, but at least Lakshmi steered Rushdie's public image away from that of a victim of religious tyranny. Unfortunately, it was towards that of a victim of romantic folly. One consequence is that Rushdie's relationships have since gained more attention than his books.

The fatwa memoir should correct that error. It is a momentously large yet profoundly intimate subject, ideally suited to a writer whose best work has always combined historical breadth with psychological depth.

"Our lives teach us who were are," Rushdie once wrote. Of the many lessons that his life story might provide, it's the most important one that the Indian authorities have chosen not to learn: give in to gangsters and they always come back for more.