India drops 36-year ban on Rushdie book, saying it can’t find the order

Before the Iranian fatwa condemning the writer to death, before all the protests and burnings of his book and before the stabbing death of his translator, there was India’s customs notification No. 405/12/88-CUS-III.

India, writer Salman Rushdie’s home country, became the first place to impose restrictions on his novel “The Satanic Verses” in 1988, just nine days after its initial publication, because of concerns that some orthodox Muslims would find parts of the book blasphemous. The Indian government issued a bureaucratic order through the Ministry of Finance, Department of Revenue, banning imports of the book.

“Many people around the world will find it strange that it is the finance ministry that gets to decide what Indian readers may or may not read,” Rushdie wrote at the time.

This week, the ban came to an unceremonious end for a fittingly pedantic reason: The original order, from Oct. 5, 1988, is nowhere to be found.

Delhi’s high court ruled that it had no choice but to vacate the ban and allow imports of the book, given that the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs could not produce a copy of the order.

“What emerges is that none of the respondents could produce the said notification dated 05.10.1988 with which the petitioner is purportedly aggrieved,” the court wrote in its decision, dated Tuesday. “We have no other option except to presume that no such notification exists.”

The petitioner, Sandipan Khan, said he became curious about the novel in 2017 and went to bookstores in search of it. He was told that it wasn’t available in the country.

“When something is banned, it piques your interest,” he said. “Why was a book by an eminent writer, a Booker Prize winner, banned?”

Wanting to find out why the book was banned, Khan filed a public information request and ultimately was told that the order wasn’t available. When he mentioned the ordeal to an attorney friend, he suggested they file a petition challenging the constitutionality of the ban.

After the initial petition was filed in 2019, the case kept dragging on as customs officials searched for the document, said the attorney, Uddyam Mukherjee.

In the end, the officials came up short, and the court never got to weighing the question of whether a ban would be a violation of India’s constitution, Mukherjee said.

“We can’t call it a freedom of expression judgment,” he said. “The judgment stemmed from the bureaucracy’s inefficiency in producing the document.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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