Delhi high court shuts plea against ban on Salman Rushdie’s ‘Satanic Verses’

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The Delhi High Court has closed the proceedings on a 1988 petition challenging the Rajiv Gandhi government’s decision to ban the import of Salman Rushdie’s controversial novel, ‘The Satanic Verses’, India Today reported on Thursday.

In August 2022 Rushdie, lost his sight in his right eye after an attack by a knife-wielding assailant who jumped on stage at an arts gathering in New York state. Rushdie was stabbed about 10 times.

Following the attack, the man accused of stabbing Rushdie pleaded not guilty to attempted murder charges. Hadi Matar, a 26-year-old American of Lebanese descent, was already charged by the state of New York for the 2022 stabbing attack. In July this year, Matar was charged with terrorism for allegedly acting on behalf of Hezbollah, according to documents.

According to India Today, the Delhi High Court closed the proceedings, saying that since authorities failed to produce the relevant notification, it has to be presumed that it does not exist.

In an order passed on November 5, a bench headed by Justice Rekha Palli observed that the petition, which was pending since 2019, was therefore, infructuous and the petitioner would be entitled to take all actions in respect of the book as available in law, India Today reported.

“What emerges is that none of the respondents could produce the said notification dated 05.10.1988 with which the petitioner is purportedly aggrieved and, in fact, the purported author of the said notification has also shown his helplessness in producing a copy of the said notification during the pendency of the present writ petition since its filing way back in 2019,” the Delhi high court bench observed.

“In the light of the aforesaid circumstances, we have no other option except to presume that no such notification exists, and therefore, we cannot examine the validity thereof and dispose of the writ petition as infructuous,” it concluded.

Rushdie, who was born into a Muslim Kashmiri family in Bombay, now Mumbai, before moving to the United Kingdom, has long faced death threats for his fourth novel, ‘The Satanic Verses’.

Some Muslims said the book contained blasphemous passages. It was banned in many countries with large Muslim populations upon its 1988 publication.

A few months later, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then-Iran’s supreme leader, pronounced a fatwa, or religious edict, calling upon Muslims to kill the novelist and anyone involved in the book’s publication for blasphemy.

Rushdie, who called his novel “pretty mild,” went into hiding for nearly a decade. Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of the novel, was murdered in 1991.

The Iranian government said in 1998 it would no longer back the fatwa, and Rushdie has lived relatively openly in recent years. Iranian organisations, some affiliated with the government, have raised a bounty worth millions of dollars for Rushdie’s murder.

And Khomeini’s successor as supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said as recently as 2019 that the fatwa was “irrevocable.”