The decades-long banning of Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” in his native India is now in doubt – not because of a change of heart more than two years after the author’s near-fatal assassination, but because of some missing documents.

Earlier this week, a New Delhi court closed proceedings on a petition filed five years ago challenging the then government’s decision to ban the importation of the novel, which angered Muslims in world because of its alleged blasphemy, just days after its publication in 1988. In a ruling on Tuesday, according to the Press Trust of India news agency, a court presided over by Justice Rekha Palli declared that the authorities had not produced notification of the ban.

“We have no choice but to assume that no such notice exists,” the judges concluded.

The petitioner, Sandipan Khan, had argued that he could not purchase the book due to a notification issued by the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs on October 5, 1988, which prohibited its import into India, adding that he was not able to do it. locate the notification on any official website or through officials. Khan’s lawyer Uddyam Mukherjee said the court’s decision meant that at present there was nothing stopping anyone from importing the novel into India.

“But whether that means it will be sold in bookstores, I don’t know, it depends on the publishers or the sellers,” he told the Associated Press.

Reached by telephone, several bookstores in the capital were not aware of the news. An employee at Jain Book Agency in New Delhi said he did not know if this news meant the novel would be available in stores in India again, adding that if so, it could still take time and that ‘we should hear from the editor.

“What the ruling does is open a potential avenue for the book to be available here,” Mukherjee said, but added that any aggrieved individual, group or government can also appeal.

Rushdie’s literary agent, Andrew Wylie, declined to comment to the AP. Rushdie, now a citizen of the United Kingdom and the United States, has yet to comment publicly. He has over a million followers on his X account, where he last posted in September.

Rushdie’s publisher in India, Penguin Random House India, released a statement on Friday calling the decision “an important new development” and adding that it was “considering next steps”.

This week’s decision adds a new twist to Rushdie’s complex relationship with India, where he was born in 1947, just before the country’s independence. He left as a child and was living in the United Kingdom at the time of his bestselling novel, “Midnight’s Children,” which came out in 1981 and infuriated then-Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, which was satirized in the book. After suing over a reference that she caused her husband’s death, Rushdie agreed to remove it and the case was settled.

When India banned “The Satanic Verses,” Rushdie condemned the action and doubted whether his censors had even read the novel. In an open letter to then-Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, published in The New York Times in 1988, he claimed the book was being “used as a political football” and called the ban not only “a anti-democratic, but also opportunistic.” Over the years, Rushdie made private trips to India and attended the Jaipur Literary Festival in 2007. But five years later, he canceled his plans to attend the Jaipur gathering due to security concerns. The festival did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the decision.

Besides being banned in his native country, “The Satanic Verses” prompted a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death from Iran’s Ayotollah Ruhollah Khomeini, forcing the author into hiding in 1989. He gradually returned to normal life, especially after the Iranian authorities announced in 1998 that the government had no intention of implementing it. But his relative calm ended abruptly in 2022, when he was stabbed multiple times on stage by a young attacker at a literary festival in Western New York. Rushdie survived the attack, which left him blind in one eye, and wrote about it in his memoir “Knife,” a finalist this year for the National Book Award.

On Friday, Khan’s lawyer said his client was an avid book reader, determined to find answers after discovering the novel was banned. He filed numerous requests for information from various authorities and tried for over a year to obtain notification. Mukherjee said authorities told Khan it was not possible to trace him.

“When we realized there was no hope, we approached the court and challenged the notification,” Mukherjee added.

The court also declared that Khan had the right under the law to obtain this book. So how does he plan to get it now?

“He doesn’t have a clear answer to this question yet: If the book becomes available in India, he will buy a copy,” Mukherjee said. “But he can also potentially buy it online from international booksellers, as it is no longer illegal to import the book into the country.”