In 1988, India issued an order forbidding the import of Salman Rushdie’s novel. A Delhi Court has overturned the order, not because of free speech, but because no one could find it.

The Delhi High Court has closed a longstanding case challenging the alleged 1988 ban on importing Indian-British writer Salman Rushdie’s controversial novel, The Satanic Verses, after customs authorities failed to produce any record of the notification purportedly enforcing the ban.