What really happened with The Satanic Verses?

The first session of this year’s Times Literary Carnival was titled “A Difficult Muse” and was supposed to be about the literature that Pakistan inspires. You wouldn’t think Salman Rushdie’s controversial 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, would figure in this discussion since the novel has nothing to do with Pakistan. However, before lassoing The Satanic Verses into the conversation, moderator Srijana Mitra Das cheerfully observed that no literature festival is complete without a whiff of scandal and a mention of The Satanic Verses. And so it came to pass that retired bureaucrat G Parthasarathy spoke for the first time about how and why the Indian government banned Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. At the time, Parthasarathy was working with the prime minister’s office. [caption id=“attachment_1271149” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] PTI[/caption] “When the book was published, we were going through communal tensions in UP and elsewhere. The communal situation in UP was bad. You had the Malyana and Meerut riots and large number of MPs wrote to the PM that they had heard about this book and really, they felt that it should not be permitted in India. It will only raise communal tensions. Therefore in terms of the law, a book can be banned only if it is likely to “disturb public order” and that judgement has to be taken by the Union Home Secretary, who was then a Coorgi called Somaiya. And Mr Somaiya read the book and he came to the conclusion that there were blasphemous references, that at a time when the Muslim community in India was under strain, it was not good to add further fuel to the fire. And therefore he took a decision which was an objective decision, based on requirements of law on order, to say no import for the present. More or less that was the decision. Now, this talk that it was banned by the Prime Minister [Rajiv Gandhi] and the politics is nonsense. When it was banned, that evening Doordarshan referred to it. The Prime Minister called me and asked me, ‘What is all this about banning the book?’ And I said that I would check with the Home Secretary and get back, and the next morning I told him it was the Home Secretary’s decision and him being a highly respected civil servant, the PM did not question him. Now, we intended to keep that decision secret because we didn’t want to further inflame tensions nor did we wish to get into controversy. And if things quietened down, we’d left the door open for us to permit its import. Now Salman somehow or the other found out we’d banned it. He sent a very nasty letter, a faxed message, to the Prime Minister which came down to me. I did not intend to enter into a further controversy so I just, we just filed it in the Prime Minister’s office, not responding to it. Finding us not responding, Salman decided he needed a bit of publicity and I’m being brutally frank about this. He calls a press conference in London to which the BBC is invited and lampoons India for lacking freedom, for the Prime Minister being a censor without bothering to check with us why it was done or what it was done. And then BBC plays it on its Persian language services, which are listened apparently very avidly to by the Ayatollahs … so when the Iranians learn that the Indians have banned a book blasphemous of Islam, they said we are the Islamic republic, and they went one step further. But the reality is that I think it was a bit of Salman’s own recklessness. If he’d come back to us, discussed it, but going public to lampoon India as a secular, democratic country banning the book really was what led ultimately to whatever happened. I have never spoken about this… but I thought I would share it with this audience in Mumbai because you would understand.” Perhaps because the letter he’d first sent got filed away in silence, Salman Rushdie wrote an open letter to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi after hearing The Satanic Verses had been banned in India. Years later, in his memoir Joseph Anton, Rushdie admitted that the letter was “arrogant” and “angry”. He also wrote that it was the Indian deputy high commissioner in London who had informed Rushdie of the ban. Parthasarathy was part of the panel discussing Pakistan as a muse because he had spent time in the country as the Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan. The other panellists were journalist Declan Walsh and author Aatish Taseer. Pakistani author Mohammed Hanif, who was a rousing hit with audiences at last year’s Times Literary Carnival, was originally meant to join Parthasarathy, Walsh and Taseer. However, last evening, it was learnt that Hanif and another Pakistani author, Nadeem Aslam, would be unable to make it to this year’s festival because of visa “issues”.