Satanic Verses: Missing order raises questions about banned Salman Rushdie book

Raju Ramachandran, a senior lawyer, said he found the suggestion a “little extreme”.

“All that the high court says is that this particular petition has become infructuous [invalid] since the notification could not be found,” he said. “It has not given the right to the petitioner to import the book.”

Senior lawyer Sanjay Hegde said the book could have been published in India if “someone was brave enough to print it” as only its import was banned, not its publication.

“But after all the brouhaha, nobody wanted to print it in India.”

In 2012, the government of Rajasthan state sought the arrest, external of four Indian authors – Hari Kunzru, Ruchir Joshi, Amitava Kumar and Jeet Thayil – after they downloaded a few passages from the Satanic Verses and read them out at a literary festival in the city.

At the time, many legal experts were of the opinion that downloading a book whose import had been banned could not be considered a crime. But online copies of the book have been hard to find in India.

Rushdie, 76, continues to face threats over his outspoken views on Islam.

In 2022, he lost an eye and spent six weeks in hospital after being stabbed up to 10 times on stage at an event in New York state. The suspect, Hadi Matar, has been charged with attempted murder.

In his recent memoir, the writer has criticised the response to his book, noting that “no properly authorised body [in India] had reviewed the book, nor was there any semblance of a judicial process”.