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| DATE | 2024-11-09 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] Satanic Versus banned in India -- bet you didn't
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The Savior of ‘Satanic Verses’ in India: Bureaucratic Ineptitude
November 8, 2024in News
India Drops 36-Year Ban on Rushdie Book, Saying It Can’t Find the Order
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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.”
The petitioner, Sandipan Khan, a 50-year-old living in Delhi and
Kolkata, said he became curious about the novel in 2017 and went to
bookstores in search of it. He was told that there was some kind of ban
and that it wasn’t available in the country.
“When something is banned, it piques your interest,” he said in an
interview. “Why was a book by an eminent writer, a Booker Prize winner,
banned?”
Wanting to find out why the book was banned, Mr. Khan filed a public
information request with one ministry, only to have his request sent to
another, then another, before he ultimately was told that the order
wasn’t available. When he mentioned the ordeal to a friend who happened
to be an attorney, the friend suggested they file a petition challenging
the constitutionality of the ban, Mr. Khan said.
After the initial petition was filed in 2019, the bureaucratic labyrinth
continued — 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, Mr. 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.”
It’s not clear if the lifting of the customs ban means the book will be
available on shelves in India any time soon. New bureaucratic
restrictions could be imposed, and book reviewers said getting shipments
of books in India can be an onerous process with many pitfalls.
The book has also been available to readers in India through a variety
of websites — but downloading it would have technically violated the
ban. Mr. Khan said he didn’t want to break the law to surreptitiously
read the book.
There has never been a legal ban against the book being published in
India, as there had been in other countries, including Bangladesh, Sudan
and Sri Lanka. Penguin India, the local arm of the book’s British
publisher, decided at the time not to locally publish the book, which
fictionalizes parts of the life of the Prophet Muhammad, after a
literary adviser raised concerns that it could be taken as offensive.
The ban touched off heated debates in India at the time about whether
politicians were pandering to Muslim voters, and about the freedom of
expression. The book’s publication in the United States in early 1989
led to far more violent protests across the world. Several people were
killed in riots in Mumbai and other parts of India.
Mr. Rushdie has denied the book was about the Prophet Muhammad or about
Islam, writing that it was rather “about migration, metamorphosis,
divided selves, love, death, London and Bombay.” In a letter published
in The New York Times in 1988 addressed to then prime minister Rajiv
Gandhi, he bemoaned his book “being used as a political football” and
argued that the ban was anti-democratic and an embarrassment for India’s
democracy.
Representatives of Mr. Rushdie did not immediately respond to requests
for comment. After the publication of his memoir recounting the 2022
knife attack that left him blind in one eye and nearly killed him, Mr.
Rushdie said he never saw himself as a symbol. “I’m just me. I’m just
somebody who’s trying to be a writer, trying to do his best. And that’s
all I’ve ever wanted to be,” he said.
As for Mr. Khan, he said he is in no hurry seven years after first
taking an interest the book. He has yet to place an order.
“I will consult with my lawyer first,” he said. “Plus, it is open to
anyone else in the country now to place the order.”
The post The Savior of ‘Satanic Verses’ in India: Bureaucratic
Ineptitude appeared first on New York Times.
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