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Writing to the then Indian prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, in October 1988, Salman Rushdie lamented that Indian democracy had become “a laughing stock” after the government placed a ban on importing his contentious novel The Satanic Verses.
Now 36 years later, the author may have the last laugh as the ban looks set to be lifted after the Indian government failed to locate the original order.
Rushdie’s magical realist novel caused a global stir when it was released in September 1988. It was inspired by the life of the prophet Muhammad, and though it did not name him and featured only fictional characters and places, it was condemned by Islamic figures as blasphemous and led to a fatwa being issued against Rushdie by the supreme leader of Iran.
Rushdie was forced to keep a low profile for many years and was the victim of an attempted assassination in 2022, when he was stabbed multiple times during a public appearance in New York, leaving him blind in one eye.
At the time of the publication of The Satanic Verses, the Indian government decided to issue a ban on importing the book into the country, fearing a backlash among Muslim MPs, a decision Rushdie called “profoundly disturbing”.
However, there is now a question whether the customs order, reportedly issued by the ministry of finance, was ever officially notified at all.
The problem came to light in 2019 after a case was filed by Sandipan Khan, an Indian citizen, who said he had attempted to buy the novel in book shops but had been informed it was illegal. Yet, when he tried to find the notification of the import ban, it was not on any government websites.
Khan took up the issue in Delhi high court, where he challenged the import ban as unconstitutional. The case dragged on for years as the government sought multiple extensions in an attempt to track down the original order, but to no avail.
In a case on 5 November, the government had to concede before the Delhi high court that the import ban order “was untraceable and, therefore could not be produced”.
The judges overseeing the case said the court therefore had “no other option except to presume that no such notification exists”.
Uddyam Mukherjee, the lawyer representing Khan in the case, said it could only mean there was a de facto lifting of the import restrictions on the novel in India. “The ban has been lifted as of November 5 because there is no notification,” he said.
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Rushdie, who was born in India, has always insisted his novel contains nothing offensive or blasphemous towards Islam and instead is an entirely fictional exploration of issues of religion, migration and identity.
In his open letter to Gandhi, which was published in the New York Times in 1988, he criticised the Indian government for bending to the will of those he deemed “extremists, even fundamentalists” who had not actually read the book.
Rushdie’s letter also noted with amusement that the Indian government had insisted that the ban “did not detract from the literary and artistic merit of Rushdie’s work” to which he added: “Thanks for the good review.”