The Delhi Excessive Court docket has disposed of a plea difficult the 1988 ban by the Central Board of Oblique Taxes and Customs (CBIC) on the import of writer Salman Rushdie’s ebook, ‘The Satanic Verses’. This comes after the CBIC failed to provide the mentioned notification of the ban dated October 5, 1988, and admitted earlier than the bench that it “is untraceable”.
Declaring the plea as infructuous, a division bench of the courtroom on November 5 recorded that it has no different choice “besides to presume that no such notification exists”. In mild of the courtroom’s commentary, it clarified that the petitioner might be “entitled to take all actions in respect of the mentioned ebook as obtainable in legislation.”
The petitioner, Sandipan Khan, represented by advocate Uddyam Mukherjee, moved the Delhi HC in 2019 after he was unable to import the ebook on account of it being banned. He was additionally advised by numerous bookstores that the ebook shouldn’t be allowed to be offered in India and that the mentioned ebook shouldn’t be printed in India.
Rushdie’s ebook was launched in 1988 by London-based Viking/Penguin Group and was not allowed to achieve Indian readers owing to the CBIC’s notification, Khan, claiming to be a ebook lover, had submitted.
Khan, in his petition, sought the courtroom’s instructions to declare the notification issued below the Customs Act, 1962, banning the import of the ebook in India, to be unconstitutional, and quash and set it apart. Khan additionally sought that the courtroom declare that he could proceed to import the ebook from its writer/worldwide reseller or Indian or worldwide e-commerce web sites and that such motion shall not represent a violation of CBIC’s notification.
Khan had contended that the notification was neither obtainable on the web site of the authorities nor was it obtainable with the authorities. Amongst different respondent events within the petition have been the secretary of the Division of Income below the Ministry of Finance and the house secretary within the Ministry of House Affairs. In November 2022, the authorities had admitted earlier than the courtroom that the “mentioned notification is untraceable, and, subsequently, couldn’t be produced.”
Considering the peculiar state of affairs, the bench dominated, “From the aforesaid, what emerges is that not one of the respondents may produce the mentioned notification dated 05.10.1988 with which the petitioner (Khan) is purportedly aggrieved and, in truth, the purported writer of the mentioned notification has additionally proven his helplessness in producing a replica of the mentioned notification in the course of the pendency of the current writ petition since its submitting means again in 2019… In mild of the aforesaid circumstances, we now have no different choice besides to presume that no such notification exists, and, subsequently, we can’t look at the validity thereof and eliminate the writ petition as infructuous.”
