New Delhi:

India’s three-decade ban on importing author Salman Rushdie’s controversial ‘The Satanic Verses’ book has effectively been lifted after a court said the government was unable to produce the original notification that imposed the ban.

The India-born British author’s novel was banned by India in 1988 after some Muslims viewed it as blasphemous. The Delhi High Court was hearing a 2019 case challenging the import ban of the book in India.

According to a Nov. 5 court order, India’s government told the Delhi High Court that the import ban order “was untraceable and, therefore could not be produced.”

As a result, the court said it had “no other option except to presume that no such notification exists”.

“The ban has been lifted as of Nov. 5 because there is no notification,” Uddyam Mukherjee, lawyer for petitioner Sandipan Khan, said.

India’s interior and finance ministries did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Khan’s plea said he approached the court after being told at book stores that the novel could not be sold or imported in India and then when he searched, he could not find the official import ban order on the government websites.

Even in court the government has been unable to produce the order, he said.

“None of the respondents could produce the said notification … in fact the purported author of the said notification has also shown his helplessness in producing a copy,” the Nov. 5 order noted, referring to the customs department official who drafted the order.

Rushdie’s fourth fictional novel ran into a global controversy shortly after its publication in September 1988, as some Muslims saw passages about Prophet Muhammad as blasphemous.

It sparked violent demonstrations and book burnings across the Muslim world, including in India, which has the world’s third largest Muslim population.

In 1989, Iran’s then supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa, or religious edict, calling on Muslims to assassinate Rushdie, sending the Booker Prize-winning author into hiding for six years.

In August 2022, about 33 years after the fatwa, Rushdie was stabbed on stage during a lecture in New York, which left him blind in one eye and affected the use of one of his hands.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

New York:

Mumbai-born author Salman Rushdie has endorsed Kamala Harris’s candidacy for the US presidency and said he believes she is the person who can prevent former president Donald Trump from dragging the country towards authoritarianism.

Rushdie on Sunday extended his support and endorsement of US Vice President Harris during a virtual ‘South Asian Men for Harris’ event attended by scores of leading names from the Indian-American community, including prominent lawmakers, authors, policy experts, entrepreneurs and diaspora organisations.

“It’s a critical moment. I’m a boy from Bombay and it’s great to see an Indian woman running for the White House. And my wife is African-American, so we like the fact that a Black and Indian woman is running for the White House,” Rushdie said.

Harris, 59, is the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic Party. She officially declared her candidacy after incumbent President Joe Biden withdrew from the race for a second term on July 20. She is expected to be officially declared as the presidential candidate by the Democrats next month.

The 77-year-old British-American novelist also noted that ethnicity itself is not enough. “We would not be gathering in this way let’s say for Usha Vance or Nikki Haley,” he said, referring to the Indian-American wife of Republican Vice Presidential nominee J D Vance and the Indian-American former South Carolina governor.

Rushdie emphasised that the momentum is because something “very extraordinary, transformative has happened in American politics” in just under one week.

“The conversation has entirely changed with the arrival of Kamala Harris’s candidacy and it’s changed most joyfully, a way of optimism and positive, forward-thinking,” he said.

Rushdie underscored that the community has to make that work because “we can’t allow the alternative to happen”.

“This hollow man without a single noble quality, trying to drag this country towards authoritarianism. That cannot happen,” he said, referring to 78-year-old Trump, a Republican.

Rushdie voiced his confidence that Harris “is the person who can prevent it. And so I’m right in 1,000 per cent in for her.” He added that star power matters in America and one could argue that Trump’s celebrity status from being on TV for many years helped him get elected to the White House in 2016.

“Well, right now, he doesn’t look like the star. He looks like the old, fat guy. Kamala looks like the superstar. And I think the charisma she brings to the campaign could be critical in the weeks ahead,” he said.

In response to a question that there are sceptics in the country who believe that America would not elect a woman with Black and Indian heritage as President, Rushdie said this may well have been an argument even as recently as maybe a decade but the times have changed.

“I think the way in which women’s leadership is viewed now is different. The way in which the race issue can be made a positive is a new thing. And so I think there’s absolutely no reason why Kamala Harris should not win and actually win it quite handily,” Rushdie said.

Underlining that the tide is turning, Rushdie cited recent media polls that put Harris neck and neck with Trump, “which is a pretty big bounce from the last Biden poll”.

“And it’s not even a week. We can do this. We just have to believe it.” Rushdie called on people across the country, including the writer community, to “use every power we have, whether it’s speaking out, writing, arguing, we’ve got to win this argument. And writers are pretty good at arguing. So I think we’re going to do our best.” Noting that the November 5 presidential election is just 100 days away, Rushdie said: “There’s not a minute to lose,” as he urged “aunties” and extended families to mobilise and come out and vote in large numbers for Harris.

With communities ranging from South Asian to Indo-Carribean coming together and galvanising for Harris, Rushdie described their support as very moving.

“It’s moving in the way that in recent days these great assemblies of people have been moving. The gathering of Black women, the gathering of White women, the gathering of Asian women, and now this event. It just shows that there is enormous power in our coming together,” he said.

Rushdie underscored that “we cannot be complacent. We have to fight this down to the wire because it’s probably going to go down to the wire, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be the first pass the post. I believe we can”.

The event called on all South Asian men and women to rally, fundraise and get out to vote for “our first female president, Kamala Harris!” The event, co-hosted by CEO and Co-founder of full-service digital agency Digimentors Sree Sreenivasan, featured prominent names including Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi from Illinois, co-founder of South Asians for Harris Harini Krishnan and Montgomery County Commissioner Neil Makhija.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

New York:

The man accused of trying to kill the author Salman Rushdie has been charged with terrorism for allegedly acting on behalf of Hezbollah, according to documents unsealed Wednesday.

Hadi Matar, a 26-year-old American of Lebanese descent who was already charged by the state of New York for the 2022 stabbing attack, has now been indicted by a grand jury on three counts that include attempting to provide material to support a foreign terrorist organization, said the indictment dated July 17 but not unsealed until now.

That organization is Lebanon’s Iran-backed movement Hezbollah, the US Justice Department said.

In August 2022 Rushdie, now 77, lost his sight in his right eye after the attack by a knife-wielding assailant, who jumped on stage at an arts gathering in New York state. Rushdie was stabbed about 10 times.

The Indian-born author, a naturalized American based in New York, had faced death threats since his 1988 novel “The Satanic Verses” was declared blasphemous by Iran’s supreme leader.

In 1989, that leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa, or religious edict, calling on Muslims anywhere in the world to kill Rushdie.

Hezbollah endorsed the fatwa, the FBI said in a statement Wednesday.

“We allege that in attempting to murder Salman Rushdie in New York in 2022, Hadi Matar committed an act of terrorism in the name of Hezbollah, a designated terrorist organization aligned with the Iranian regime,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a separate statement.

“The defendant attempted to carry out a fatwa endorsed by Hezbollah that called for the death of Salman Rushdie,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray.

Between September 2020 and the summer of the attack Matar sought to provide material support to Hezbollah by trying to carry out the fatwa against Rushie, the Justice Department said.

The other two counts in the indictment charge Matar with engaging in an act of terrorism transcending national boundaries and providing material support to terrorists.

– Life after fatwa –

The award-winning author was stabbed multiple times in the neck and abdomen at the New York literary conference before attendees and guards subdued the assailant.

Matar has told the New York Post newspaper that he had only read two pages of Rushdie’s novel but believed he had “attacked Islam.”

Rushdie lived in seclusion in London for the first decade after the fatwa but for the past 20 years lived a relatively normal life in New York.

This year Rushdie published a memoir called “Knife” in which he recounted the near death experience.

In an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” program in April, Rushdie recounted how one of the surgeons who saved his life had said: “First you were really unlucky and then you were really lucky.”

“I said, ‘What’s the lucky part?’ and he said, ‘Well, the lucky part is that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife,'” Rushdie said.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

London:

 Booker Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie has revealed the decision behind not naming his would-be assassin in his new memoir ‘Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder’ was to rob him of “the oxygen of publicity”.

Addressing a literary event at the Southbank Centre in London on Sunday virtually from New York, the 76-year-old Mumbai-born British-American novelist was in conversation with author and critic Erica Wagner about his account of the brutal on-stage knife attack in which he permanently lost vision in one eye.

He credited former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher with the phrase “oxygen of publicity”, which she used in the context of the violent attacks of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in the 1980s, as the motivation behind referring to his attacker only as “A” in the book.

“That phrase, the oxygen of publicity, somehow stuck in my head. And I thought, well, so this guy had his 27 seconds of fame and now he should go back to being a nobody. I’m not going to name him, I don’t want his name in my book,” said Rushdie.

“So, I use this initial ‘A’ because I thought there were many things he was: a would-be assassin, an assailant, an adversary; he was many things, he was an ass,” he said, with a wry smile.

The acclaimed author was on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in New York in August 2022 when he was stabbed up to 10 times by the accused Hadi Matar, who awaits trial for attempted murder in prison. But the author revealed that he did not feel anger towards his assailant and the new book was his way of taking control of the narrative.

“What it did do, I feel, is it gave me back control of the narrative. So, instead of being a man lying on the stage in a pool of blood, I’m a man writing a book about a man lying on the stage with a pool of blood. And that felt like it gave me back the power; my story, that I’m telling in my way, and that felt good,” he shared.

Rushdie is well known as a writer of magical realism, something he attributes to his early childhood in India and growing up with fantastical tales.

“I’m quite down to earth in my world view, I don’t believe in miracles and things like that but somehow my books always have…I think a lot of that has to do with having grown up in a world in India, where all the stories you first hear are kind of fantastic tales, fable like and magical,” said the author, who won the Booker of Bookers for ‘Midnight’s Children’ – a fable like tale about modern India.

“I always thought that was a good way to approach things and that somehow you could even get closer to the truth about human nature by abandoning realism. Also, I thought the world has abandoned realism. We don’t live in realism, we live in surrealism,” he noted.

But of his own survival from the brutal knife attack, Rushdie has a more pragmatic view: “So many people have said to me that my survival was a miracle. I don’t believe any kind of divine hand reached down and helped me out. But I do believe in other kinds of miracles, I believe in medical miracles. I believe in the miracle of surgeons and just luck.

“So much of human life is determined by chance… the fact is that he tried very hard to kill me, but actually, he missed.” The event, which was streamed globally, formed part of the Southbank Centre’s Spring Season of Literature and Spoken Word, which brings together internationally-acclaimed authors, artists, historians, politicians and journalists.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Frankfurt, Germany:

Author Salman Rushdie on Friday called for a “cessation” in fighting between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, saying he was filled with “horror” and “foreboding”.

Hamas group rushed into Israel from the Gaza Strip on October 7 and killed at least 1,400 people, mostly civilians who were shot, mutilated or burnt to death, according to Israeli officials.

Israel said around 1,500 Hamas fighters were killed before its army regained control of the area under attack.

More than 4,000 Palestinians, mainly civilians, have been killed in Gaza in relentless Israeli bombardments in retaliation for the Hamas attack, according to the latest toll from the Hamas health ministry in Gaza.

Making a rare public appearance since a near-fatal stabbing attack in the United States last year, Rushdie said he was horrified at the escalating conflict.

“I am filled with horror about the attack by Hamas,” the British writer told a press conference at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world’s biggest publishing trade event.

“I’m filled with foreboding about what (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu might do in return.

“I just hope that there can be a cessation in hostilities at the earliest point.”

‘Difficult year’ 

Rushdie lost sight in one eye after the attack by a knife-wielding assailant who jumped on stage at an arts event in New York state in August 2022.

The author, a naturalised American based in New York, has faced death threats since his 1988 novel “The Satanic Verses” was declared blasphemous by Iran’s supreme leader.

Wearing glasses with a black lens over his right eye, Rushdie said on Friday: “It’s obviously been a difficult year.”

“But I’m happy to be back in reasonable health,” added the author, who is to receive the prestigious Peace Prize of the German Book Trade on Sunday.

The knife attack “was a pretty harsh and sharp reminder” of the fatwa issued against him, he said.

He added that it was “somewhat surprising” as “the temperature had cooled off”.

“I’m just happy to still be here to say so. It was a close thing.”

Threats to democratic values 

The award-winning author, 76, was stabbed multiple times in the neck and abdomen at a literary conference before attendees and guards subdued the assailant.

Earlier this month, Rushdie’s publishers announced he would next April release a memoir about the attack entitled “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder”.

Asked about the new work, he said it seemed “impossible to write anything else”.

“It would seem kind of absurd to write something else until I had dealt with this subject.”

He also voiced concern about threats to democracy in some parts of the world, referring to the “madness of the (US) Republican Party”.

“It’s very worrying that one of the major political parties in the United States seems to have departed from democratic values and moved towards a kind of cult of personality,” he said.

Rushdie singled out India — where he was born in 1947 — saying there was “increasing risk to journalists and anyone who stands up against or criticises the administration”.

He also criticised recent moves to prosecute Booker Prize-winning Indian novelist Arundhati Roy.

“She is one of the great writers of India and a person of enormous integrity and passion,” he said.

“The idea that she should be brought to court for expressing those values is disgraceful.”

Earlier this month, Indian media reported that Roy — a trenchant critic of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government — could be prosecuted for a 2010 speech about Kashmir.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)