Fri Nov 08 00:33:28 UTC 2024: ## Delhi High Court Dismisses Petition Challenging Ban on Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses”
**New Delhi:** The Delhi High Court has closed proceedings on a petition challenging the Rajiv Gandhi government’s 1988 ban on the import of Salman Rushdie’s controversial novel “The Satanic Verses.” The court concluded that the ban notification, which the petitioner claimed was preventing him from importing the book, does not exist.
The petition, filed in 2019 by Sandipan Khan, alleged that the notification, issued by the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs, was the reason he couldn’t import the book. However, despite extensive efforts, neither the petitioner nor the authorities could produce a copy of the notification.
A bench headed by Justice Rekha Palli, along with Justice Saurabh Banerjee, observed that since the notification remained untraceable, it must be presumed that it does not exist. The court, therefore, dismissed the petition as infructuous, stating that it couldn’t examine the validity of a non-existent notification.
The book, which won the Booker Prize, was banned in 1988 due to protests from Muslim communities who deemed it blasphemous. The petitioner had sought to overturn the ban and related directives issued by the Ministry of Home Affairs. He also requested the court to enable him to import the book from its publisher or online retailers.
The court’s ruling effectively ends the legal challenge against the ban, leaving the future of the book’s import in India uncertain.
First Piper 