NEW DELHI – The decades-long ban on Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” in his native India is now being questioned — not because of a change of heart more than two years after the author’s near-fatal stabbing, but because of what a lack means. documents.

Earlier this week, a court in New Delhi closed proceedings on a five-year-old petition challenging the then-government’s decision to ban the import of the novel, which angered Muslims worldwide over its alleged blasphemy, at just days after its publication in 1988. In a ruling on Tuesday, according to the Press Trust of India, a bench headed by Justice Rekha Palli said the authorities had not they managed to submit the ban notice.

“We have no option but to assume that there is no such notice,” the judges concluded.

The petitioner, Sandipan Khan, claimed that he could not buy the book because of a notification issued by the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs on October 5, 1988, which prohibited its import into India, adding that he could not locate the notification on any official website or through officials. Khan’s lawyer, Uddyam Mukherjee, said the court’s decision meant there was now nothing to stop anyone from importing the novel into India.

“But if that means it’s going to be sold in bookstores — I don’t know, that’s up to the publishers or the sellers,” he told The Associated Press.

When contacted by phone, several bookstores in the country’s capital did not know the news. An employee of Jain Book Agency in New Delhi said he did not know if this news meant the novel would be available in stores in India again, adding that if it was, it could still take time and you should hear from to the publisher.

“What the decision does is open a potential avenue for the book to become available here,” Mukherjee said, but added that any aggrieved person, group or government could also appeal it.

Rushdie’s literary agent, Andrew Wylie, declined to comment to the AP. Rushdie, now a citizen of the United Kingdom and the United States, has yet to comment publicly. He has over 1 million followers on his X account, which he last posted in September.

Rushdie’s US publisher, Penguin Random House, issued a statement on Friday calling the ruling a “significant new development” and adding that it was “considering next steps”. The author’s publisher in India, Penguin Random House India, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This week’s ruling adds a new twist to Rushdie’s complex relationship with India, where he was born in 1947, just before the country’s independence. He left as a child and was living in the United Kingdom at the time of his novel Midnight’s Children, which appeared in 1981 and angered India’s prime minister at the time, Indira Gandhi, who was satirized in the book. After suing over a reference that she caused her husband’s death, Rushdie agreed to drop it and the case was settled.

When India banned The Satanic Verses, Rushdie condemned the action and doubted that his censors had even read the novel. In an open letter to then-prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, published in The New York Times in 1988, he argued that the book “is being used as a political football” and called the ban not just “anti-democratic, but opportunistic”. Over the years, Rushdie has made private trips to India and attended the Jaipur Literary Festival in 2007. But five years later, he canceled plans to attend the Jaipur gathering due to security concerns. The festival did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the decision.

In addition to being banned in his home country, The Satanic Verses prompted a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death by Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, forcing the author into hiding in 1989. He gradually resumed a normal life, especially after that Iranian officials announced in 1998 that the Government had no intention of implementing it. But his relative calm ended abruptly in 2022, when he was repeatedly stabbed on stage by a young assailant during a Western New York literary festival. Rushdie survived the attack, which left him blind in one eye, and wrote about it in his memoir Knife, a finalist this year for the National Book Award.

On Friday, Khan’s lawyer said his client was an avid book reader, driven to find answers after learning the novel had been banned. He made numerous requests for information to various authorities – and tried for over a year to get the notification. Mukherjee said Khan was told by authorities that he could not be prosecuted.

“When we realized there was no hope, we went to court and challenged the notice,” Mukherjee added.

The court also said that Khan has the right under the law to procure this book. So how does he plan to get it now?

“He doesn’t have a clear answer to that yet — if it becomes available in India, he will buy a copy of it,” Mukherjee said. “But he can also buy it from international booksellers online because it is no longer illegal to import the book into the country.”