Although the banning of books has a long history, the West, apart from the sordid Hitler decade, has not been active in that field for some time. The number of books banned in the West in this century has been so low as to make each of them a cause célèbre: Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Lolita. Yet each of these was officially deemed an affront on moral grounds (sexual, to be precise), not political ones.
In the Third World, the situation is quite different: Third World countries are as serious about their politics as we once were about our sex lives. This has been brought home to us again recently by the act of the Indian government banning Salman Rushdie’s new novel, The Satanic Verses, for its unflattering picture of Islam. I don’t wish to blame the Indian government out of hand. The world’s largest (and most flawed) democracy has been racked with so much communal violence that it is too easy for us in the West to invoke the First Amendment. When was the last time a Greyhound bus was blown up and its passengers gunned down? Still, banning a book hardly serves the cause of democracy in the long run.
Although The Satanic Verseswon Britain’s prestigious Whitbread Prize, it is the banning that propelled it from the book-review section of the newspaper to the front page. (Viking, the book’s American publisher, has received a few bomb threats, and
