Delhi High Court Questions Legality of Importing The Satanic Verses in India۔ The question rises if is it legal to import Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in India? This long-standing tension found a new and intense focus this week when the Delhi High Court “hints that the 1988 government notification banning the novel’s import may have lapsed, since no official record of the ban could be located”.
In 1988, The Satanic Verses, published by Salman Rushdie, was condemned within hours of its release by some groups of Muslims as blasphemous and led to protests worldwide. Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, in 1989, issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death forcing the author, born in India, into a life in hiding for nearly a decade. Although the book remains officially banned in India, recent judicial change of heart suggests import restriction might be lifted if government does not renew the ban.
Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses is Banned in India!
The controversy resurfaced when the citizen of West Bengal wanted to purchase the book; unable to get one, either locally printed or imported in India, the citizen sent an RTI in 2017, with a hope of obtaining the original government notification. A couple of years passed along with several departmental transfers, but no official copy of the ban appeared, which proved a stimulus to a petition in the Delhi High Court by Khan.
On November 5, the court said it had “no choice but to presume” that the notice could not be found and therefore “could not evaluate its validity.” This creates a novel question of law: if there is a notification of a ban, but it cannot be found, can the ban be enforced?
Nothing is Clearly Said on Importing the Satanic Book So Far!
While it is true that technically no ban stands if the notification cannot be seen, not all agree with this view of former Supreme Court judge Madan Lokur. Another senior lawyer, Raju Ramachandran, believes that this judgment does not allow import but invalidates the petition by Khan due to the missing notification. According to legal expert Sanjay Hegde, the ban still only applied to import and not publication, though no Indian publisher has yet dared to print it.
In fact, the High Court warned Khan to explore options of seeking a legal remedy if he wanted the book on Indian soil. As it stands now, Rushdie has not stopped speaking against threats and censorship.
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