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, the 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 in Britain, 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,” Mr. Rushdie wrote at the time.
This week, the 36-year 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, and therefore, we cannot examine the validity thereof.”
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