MOSCOW: A Russian court on Wednesday upheld a decision to permit the local publication a sacred Hindu text whose initial ban sparked protests in India and threatened to strain Moscow's close ties with New Delhi.
A district court in the Siberian city of Tomsk said in a statement it had decided "to leave unchanged" a December lower court ruling stating that the "Bhagavad Gita" did not contain extremist material.
Prosecutors had been trying to ban the text's translation for months because it contained a prologue by Swami Prabhupada -- founder of the Hare Krishna movement that has had repeated run-ins with the law in post-Soviet Russia.
Prosecutors had asked for the ban in June after running a check on Hare Krishna's activities in the Siberian region. The Russian general prosecutor's office had also conduction national checks on the movement in 2004 and 2005.
The case threatened to create an unexpected roadblock in the traditionally close relations between Moscow and New Delhi.
Indian Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna described the prosecutors' attempted ban as the work of "ignorant and misdirected or motivated individuals" that attacked a text defining the "very soul of our great civilisation".
Comments
Comments are closed for this article.