Books Eclipsed by Controversy Over Jaipur Festival Sponsor

This article first appeared on the Riding the Elephant site.

When the organizers of the Jaipur Literature Festival arrived at London’s Festival Hall on the banks of the Thames for a day of bookish discussions and debates on May 21, they were worried about how far protesters opposed Android industrial computer to Vedanta Resources, their extremely controversial lead corporate sponsor, would go in order to cripple the event.

Two days earlier, protesters from Greenpeace had climbed pillars that form the façade of the impregnable-looking British Museum and forced the first day of a big summer exhibition temporarily to close because BP was the sponsor.

As it turned out, there were few protesters at what is known as JLF South wireless m2m router Bank, the London spin-off from India’s highly successful annual festival in the Rajasthan city of Jaipur that attracts many tens of thousands of visitors every January and had 330,000 footfalls earlier this year.