Former minister P Chidambaram tells audience he has ‘no hesitation’ in saying ban on Rushdie’s controversial novel was wrong – but 27-year embargo stands

India’s ban on The Satanic Verses in 1988 was “wrong”, a former minister from Rajiv Gandhi’s government has said, prompting Salman Rushdie to ask how long it will take for the “mistake” to be corrected.

Speaking at the Times literary festival in Delhi on Saturday, former finance minister P Chidambaram told an audience that “I have no hesitation in saying that the ban was wrong”, the Times of India reported. The October 1988 ban from Rajiv Gandhi’s government prevented the book from being imported to India, and is still in place. Chidambaram was minister of state for home when the ban occurred.

“This admission just took 27 years,” tweeted Rushdie in response. “How many more before the ‘mistake’ is corrected?”

Salman Rushdie (@SalmanRushdie) This admission just took 27 years. How many more before the "mistake" is corrected? https://t.co/qz7t1InXzV

In a second high-profile vote of confidence for the writer, Barack Obama selected his latest novel, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, as one of his christmas choices in what has become a traditional, highly-scrutinised bookshop outing with his family.

The two endorsements come at the end of a season in which Iran reaffirmed its hostility by withdrawing from the Frankfurt book fair in protest at the fact that Rushdie had been asked to give a keynote speech.

In his memoir, Joseph Anton, Rushdie writes that The Satanic Verses “was not examined by any properly authorised body, nor was there any semblance of judicial process”, before the Indian ban was enacted, and that “the ban came, improbably enough, from the finance ministry, under section 11 of the Customs Act, which prevented the book from being imported.”

“Weirdly,” Rushdie added in the memoir, “the finance ministry stated that the ban ‘did not detract from the literary and artistic merit’ of his work. Thanks a lot, he thought.”

Rushdie describes the ban as a “painful blow” in Joseph Anton, saying that “out of that pain” he wrote an open letter to Rajiv Gandhi. “This is no way, Mr Gandhi, for a free society to behave,” he wrote. “What sort of India do you wish to govern? Is it to be an open or a repressive society? Your action in the matter of The Satanic Verses will be an important indicator for many people around the world.”

In the memoir, which is written in the third person, Rushdie writes that he was “defending a thing he revered above most things, the art of literature, against a piece of blatant political opportunism”. The letter ended: “You own the present, Mr Prime Minister; but the centuries belong to art.”

The day after the letter was published, Rushdie’s publishers, Viking, received their first death threat. In February 1989, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini called for Rushdie’s death as he issued a fatwa against him. In 2012, Rushdie was forced to pull out of attending a literary festival in Jaipur over threats of violence, and in 2013, his planned visit to Kolkata to promote the film of his novel Midnight’s Children was cancelled, the author saying at the time that “the day before I was due to travel to Kolkata we were informed that the Kolkata police would refuse to allow me to enter the city. If I flew there, I was told, I would be put on the next plane back. I was also told that this was at the request of the chief minister.”

Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty‑Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie review – a modern Arabian Nights Read more

Rushdie reacted to news that Obama had had bought Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, during his outing to independent bookshop Upshur Street Books in Washington DC, in robust form.

Responding to a Twitter comment that the purchase was Obama “thumb[ing] his nose at Ayatollah Khamene’i by very publicly buying @SalmanRushdie’s latest”, Rushdie asked: “Would it be wrong to think that there might be a reason for buying my book that is not related to Khomeini?”

The New York Times reported that the US president also took the opportunity of his Small Business Saturday outing to buy Jonathan Franzen’s Purity, three young adult titles by Cynthia Voight, and Jeff Kinney’s eighth Wimpy Kid title, Hard Luck.