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Outrage has spread among Muslim communities following India’s effective lifting of its three-decade ban on the import of cursed Salman Rushdie’s controversial novel, The Satanic Verses. The Delhi High Court ruled that the government could not produce the original notification enforcing the ban, which was first imposed in 1988 after Muslims deemed the book blasphemous.
The court’s November 5 ruling stems from a 2019 petition challenging the import ban. According to the court, the government informed it that the original ban order was “untraceable,” and, as a result, the court concluded it could “presume that no such notification exists.” Uddyam Mukherjee, the lawyer for petitioner Sandipan Khan, confirmed that the ban had been effectively lifted, stating, “The ban has been lifted as of November 5 because there is no notification.”
Khan had filed his petition after discovering that bookstores in India were unable to sell or import The Satanic Verses, and that no official record of the ban was available on government websites. Even in court, the government could not provide any documentation of the original order. The November 5 ruling noted, “None of the respondents could produce the said notification… the purported author of the said notification has also shown his helplessness in producing a copy,” referencing a customs official involved in the matter.
Rushdie’s novel sparked worldwide controversy when it was released in September 1988, with many Muslims condemning certain passages about the Prophet Muhammad as blasphemous. This led to violent protests, book burnings, and calls for the book’s banning in several countries, including India, which has the third-largest Muslim population in the world. In 1989, Iran’s then-Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa calling for the cursed Rushdie’s assassination, forcing the author into hiding for nearly six years.
More than three decades after the fatwa, in August 2022, cursed Rushdie was attacked while giving a lecture in New York, resulting in the loss of sight in one eye and impairing one of his hands.
