Editorial: For better, or Verse

Last week, the Delhi High Court surmised there’s no ban on the novel The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. Although the judgement is not a stout assertion of freedom of expression but only a limited order based on common sense logic, book lovers will welcome it.

What brought this about was not a realisation that banning books is meaningless in the Internet age but an admission of the butter-fingered functioning of bureaucracy. For five years since a petition challenging the ban was filed, the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC) could not furnish to the court a copy of the notification it issued on October 5, 1988 prohibiting import of the book under the Customs Act, 1962. Although it has archives going back to 1968, CBIC could not trace the note. Not even the officer who wrote the order had a copy of it.

Last week, the judges said there was no option other than “to presume that no such notification exists”; therefore, the petitioner was “entitled to take all actions in respect of the said book as available in law.” In other words, the ban does not exist because the note does not exist; therefore, it would not be illegal to import the book. Since there was a Customs ban only on import and never a ban on the book per se under Section 95 of the CPC, it presumably must follow that the book can be published, bought and sold, read, and circulated in the country.

However, legal quibbles are certain to arise. The High Court only pronounced the petition “infructuous” because the ban decree could not be produced; it did not go so far as to rule on the constitutionality of the ban. One wishes the court had gone further to speak its mind on arbitrary proscription of books, towards which the Indian government has an unfortunate inclination.

This judicial order does not quite remove the taint on India of being the first country to ban The Satanic Verses. The Rajiv Gandhi government’s sly and uncalled-for import block in 1988 triggered blasphemy charges against the book, which led to violent protests in Pakistan and a rash of ban orders in multiple countries, culminating in Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie in 1989. Although Tehran distanced itself from the death sentence in 1998, the writer remains a hunted man to this day. As recently as in 2022, he lost an eye after being stabbed at a literary event in America. Blood has been spilt over the book far and wide: Its Japanese translator was stabbed to death in 1991; its Italian translator was attacked in Milan the same year; and its Norwegian publisher was shot three times in Oslo in 1993.

Hopefully, the High Court order will spur the government to re-examine the books it has banned since Independence. The list includes scholarly works like Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History, literary works that have lost their shock value like An Area of Darkness by VS Naipaul and even popular fiction like The Da Vinci Code (banned in Nagaland). The common threads running through the bans are our touchiness to criticism, our inability to see heroes as human, and our discomfort on matters of sex and religion. Many of the bans were in fact import blocks through Customs orders. It would be interesting to see how many such notifications are traceable today.