Raju Ramachandran, a senior lawyer, said he thought the proposal was “a bit extreme”.
“All the Supreme Court is saying is that this particular petition has become futile (invalid) because the notification could not be found,” he said. “It has not given the petitioner the right 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.
2012, Rajasthan State Govt sought the arrest, external by four Indian writers – Hari Kunzru, Ruchir Joshi, Amitava Kumar and Jeet Thayil – after they downloaded some passages from The Satanic Verses and read them aloud at a literary festival in the city.
At the time, many legal experts believed that downloading a book whose import had been banned could not be considered a crime. But online copies of the book have been difficult 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 upstate New York. The suspect, Hadi Matar, has been charged with attempted murder.
In his latest memoir, the author has criticized the response to his book, noting that “no properly authorized body (in India) had reviewed the book, nor was there any semblance of a legal process”.
