Incompetence rights a wrong, but for how long?

Salman Rushdie
| Photo Credit: JOE MAHER

India’s customs notification No. 405/12/88-CUS-III shook the world 36 years ago. For it banned the import of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. That was months before Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa (for blaspheming Prophet Muhammad) sent the author into hiding. 

Now the world is shaking again, this time with laughter. For no one can find that notification. It has disappeared down a bureaucratic rabbit hole, forcing the Delhi High Court to allow the import of the book. 

Loss of guilt

There’s a whole new novel awaiting Rushdie’s ironic pen (or sardonic word processor) here. If the original ban implied a loss of innocence in a country proud of its freedoms, the new twist may be a loss of guilt. Perhaps the notification was as fictitious as the characters in the novel; perhaps there are other notifications that do not exist but continue to rule our lives. 

It might not be a bad idea to check out if important ones pertaining to taxes or public behaviour actually exist. Perhaps the gentleman who set the ball rolling in the court in the Satanic Verses case can now ask why some other books are unavailable in India. These were presumed to be banned, but we can’t be sure now. Books like Stanley Wolpert’s Nine Hours to Rama, Aubrey Menen’s The Ramayana, Arthur Koestler’s The Lotus and the Robot. 

The Satanic Verses notification was issued by the Finance Ministry, and Rushdie was only one of millions who wondered why that agency should decide what the country may or may not read. When an Indian citizen went to court five years ago, asking why he could not purchase the book in India, he was directed to the customs order. And given the usual run around. 

Five years later, presumably after having searched every inch of the customs department and nearby restaurants where the officials might have eaten, it emerges that there is no such order. Either that, or someone, like a spy in a cheap novel, swallowed it to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands. Anything you say about Indian bureaucracy is usually true! 

Victory of incompetence

Yet, by this act of forgetfulness or misplacement or poor housekeeping, the bureaucracy has righted a wrong perpetrated 36 years ago. This is not so much a triumph of the freedom of expression as a victory for incompetence. That detail , however, might be lost to history decades from now. 

This wasn’t a ban on literary grounds (even if Verses isn’t one of Rushdie’s best works), but on political ones. The conditions that led to the ban can be rekindled any time by politicians: one lot who want to project themselves as leaders of the community, and another who might see in protests a diversion from the real issues. 

In his book on censorship published three decades ago, the novelist J M Coetzee made the point that “the very notion of entrusting the name of the Almighty to the protection of the law courts has taken on an increasingly anachronistic air.” If only that were true.