``It will simply never happen,'' says a senior official in the Ministry of External Affairs who claims that Iran's move is only meant to open up trade with the West.

Besides the ban, Rushdie has also been denied a visa for entering India, the country of his birth. Sources say that while he first requested for a visa during the Narasimha Rao Government, he repeated it several times and sent messages through interlocutors even to the United Front government.

Officials in the I&B Ministry recall how last year, permission had also been denied to a TV crew which wished to film Rushdie's Midnight's Children

in the country. It is understood that the film's productioncompany had got verbal assurances from the Government only to be told later that a formal permission could not be granted. Reason: Salman Rushdie was still firmly on the list of ``blasphemous'' writers and the Indian Government could not be associated with a project seen to benefit him.

Publishers and politicians contacted by The Indian Express say that Iran's fatwa and India's ban were unrelated. They recall that in 1988, there had been an outrage over a review of The Satanic Verses in a magazine in which some ``offending passages'' were quoted. Later, Rushdie had talked to another magazine in which he had talked about challenging the ``established order'' in his novel.

Former MP Syed Shahabuddin was among the first to demand that the book be banned. Shahabuddin says he got the ``fragrance'' of the ``foul gutter smell'' of Rushdie's writings in press reports and had then approached Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and Home Minister Buta Singh for the ban.

Now Shahabuddin says that despiteIran's announcement, the situation remained unchanged in India. ``The book was not banned here because of the fatwa. The fatwa was a religious move but the ban was an administrative move meant to avoid social disturbances in India,'' he said. ``What Iran has done does not make the book any more palatable to Muslims in India.''

Indian publishers, too, admit that it's unlikely that the BJP government will take such a step. ``Why will any Government take on the risk of provoking passions again?'' a publisher asked. He recalled that when the ban was imposed, only about 100 hardback copies of the Penguin-Viking title had come into the country. Following an order from the Customs Department, they too had been seized.