After authorities informed the Delhi High Court that they were unable to locate an official notification regarding the restriction, the court said that an import ban on Salman Rushdie’s contentious 1988 book The Satanic Verses seemed to be “non-existent.”
Three decades after the book was published, it sparked massive protests in India and around the world, led to the supreme leader of Iran issuing a fatwa to kill the Booker Prize winner, and sparked a global debate on censorship and violence. The decision seemed to effectively pave the way for the book to be imported to India.
Sandipan Khan, a resident of Delhi’s Vasant Kunj, said in a 2019 appeal that he was unable to import the book because the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs had banned its import on October 5, 1988, in violation of the Customs Act. The Central Board of Indirect Taxes & Customs, however, told the court throughout the proceedings that the 1988 notification was no longer traceable.
In its November 5 ruling, a bench of justices Rekha Palli and Saurabh Banerjee stated, “From the aforementioned, what emerges is that none of the respondents could produce the said notification dated 5.10.1988 with which the petitioner is purportedly aggrieved and in fact the purported author of the said notification has also shown his helplessness in producing a copy of the said notification during the pendency of the present writ petition. We have no choice but to assume that no such notification exists, and therefore we cannot examine the validity thereof and dispose of the writ petition as infructuous. Therefore, the petitioner will have the right to pursue any legal action pertaining to the aforementioned book.”
Due to its alleged blasphemy, the 1988 book sparked protests, targeted attacks, and attempted assassinations of the Booker Prize winner around the globe.
Khan’s attorney argued during the hearing that even though his client attempted to obtain a copy of the notification from the Union home ministry’s office in 2017 under the Right to Information Act, he was told that the book was prohibited. Additionally, he cited the customs authorities’ November 2022 stance, according to which the notification could not be produced since it was untraceable.
The customs department stated in November 2022 that the notification was untraceable and hence could not be produced. Even in the hearing that transpired on Tuesday, the revenue and customs departments reiterated their helplessness by claiming that the notification could not be tracked down.
The plea said, “”As the contested notification does not even provide for an assessment under the Indian legal system, namely legal provisions specifically devised by the legislature and interpreted by constitutional courts that provide adequate safeguards to literary works, the state may not be able to act arbitrarily and eliminate the rights of its citizens to decide what they read and what they do not read”.
Read Also: Delhi Police Arrest 3 Men For Sexually Assaulting Mentally-ill Woman
