The Delhi High Court has lifted the 36-year-old import ban on Salman Rushdie’s controversial novel The Satanic Verses, ruling that the Customs notification banning its import could not be found, reported Bar and Bench on Thursday, November 7.
The case dates back to 1988, when the Rajiv Gandhi-led government banned the book following objections from certain Muslim groups, who claimed the book was blasphemous to Islam.
On November 5, the court declined to examine the validity of the ban after the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs admitted it could no longer locate the notification.
Justice Rekha Palli and Justice Saurabh Banerjee, presiding over the case, declared that in the absence of the notification, the court had no choice but to presume it did not exist. As a result, the petition challenging the ban, filed by Sandipan Khan in 2019, was deemed “infructuous.”
Khan had argued that the import ban on The Satanic Verses had prevented him from obtaining a copy of the book, yet no official record of the ban was available on government websites or with any authorities. The Ministry of Home Affairs, in response to an Right to Information Act request from Khan, had confirmed the book was banned.
The court’s decision effectively lifted the ban on the importation of Rushdie’s book into India, granting Khan the legal right to import it. This ruling signals the end of a long-standing restriction that had kept the book out of the Indian market for over three decades.
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