Bureaucratic mishap brings happy ending to ban on controversial Salman Rushdie book in India [Video]

It could have been a principled fight for freedom of expression in India, but in the end it was a bureaucratic blunder that forced a high court in New Delhi to overturn a 36-year-old ban on the import of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.

It happened simply because nobody could find the original customs order.

Even its name is as bureaucratic and mundane as it gets: India’s customs notification No. 405/12/88-CUS-III.

But the impact of the order, issued by India’s Ministry of Finance, was sweeping, halting all imports of the book and starting a chain reaction.

India, where Rushdie was born, was the first country to ban the book, just nine days after its publication in September 1988. Then in February 1989, the Supreme Leader of Iran at the time, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a religious edict called a fatwa that forced the author to go into hiding.