On August 5, as the Chinar Book Festival backed by the central culture ministry unfolded in Srinagar, the Jammu and Kashmir administration under Lieutenant-Governor Manoj Sinha banned 25 books, branding them as promoters of “false narratives” and “secessionism”.
Works by A G Noorani, Sumantra Bose, Arundhati Roy, and Victoria Schofield—texts on Kashmir’s history and human rights—were targeted under Section 98 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita 2023, with penalties for possession or distribution ranging from three years to life. How ingenious is it for a government to run a grand festival and simultaneously cancel books?
The J&K home department justified the ban as a necessary purge of “secessionist literature”. The order claims these books—such as Noorani’s The Kashmir Dispute 1947-2012 and Roy’s Azadi—radicalise youth by “distorting historical facts, glorifying terrorists, vilifying security forces, and fostering grievance, victimhood, and terrorist heroism”. Police raids on Srinagar bookstores followed, although no confirmed seizures have been reported. The books, many of which were published years ago by the likes of Penguin and Routledge, raise a question: why now, when their presence has long been acknowledged?
Since 2019, the central government has funded literary festivals in Kashmir. These events profess to celebrate ideas, yet the ban and measures like this set back the progress that the Indian State claims it is making in Kashmir.
Since the 2019 revocation of Article 370, J&K, as a Union territory, grants the L-G sweeping powers under the J&K Reorganisation Act 2019. Amendments to the Transaction of Business Rules in July 2024 further entrenched the L-G’s control over police, public order, the Anti-Corruption Bureau, and prosecution sanctions, sidelining Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, whose National Conference won the November 2024 elections.
Abdullah has opposed the current ban. He has gone on record that he has never banned a book and never will. Not that what he thinks makes much difference. Surely, he must wonder the point of running an elected government when the real power rests with the Raj Bhawan.
The ban’s timing—on the sixth anniversary of Article 370’s revocation— suggests a calculated move to reassert central control. The state home department cites ‘systemic dissemination’ of secessionist literature, but the abrupt order naturally lacks transparency or judicial review.
Book bans are a tired tool of power. In 35 CE, Roman emperor Caligula banned The Odyssey for its themes of freedom, fearing rebellion. Assassinated in 41 CE by the Praetorian Guards for his tyrannical rule, Caligula’s censorship failed to suppress Homer’s work; a couple of millenniums later, he would have been furious to know about the sell-out of Christopher Nolan’s movie version of The Odyssey a year ahead of its release.
In 1497-98, the Florentine friar Girolamo Savonarola’s ‘bonfires of the vanities’ put to the torch “immoral” texts; yet, he was eventually executed by the pope and immoral literature continued to flourish. The Nazis’ 1933 book burnings included works by Einstein and Kafka, whose works endure. In India, Rama Retold (1954) and The Da Vinci Code (2006) faced bans for offending religious sentiments, yet remain accessible online. There have been other banned books, like D H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Vladimir Nabakov’s Lolita, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer among them. Each country finds its suitable books to burn. But none of them stayed ashes forever. You can defeat a good writer, but you cannot destroy his/her book.
Still, the boycott and mania have continued to grow. Social media-driven boycotts, from films to jewellery, echo this impulse to control narratives and are learned from rulers past and present. India seems to be growing more intolerant. “Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too,” said German poet Heinrich Heine.
In 2025, banning books is about as medieval as you can get in a digital world. The targeted texts are available as ebooks or PDFs on Amazon, Google Books, or pirated sites like LibGen. Anuradha Bhasin, whose A Dismantled State was banned, notes their online ubiquity.
The latest ban signals heightened control in a region scarred by conflict, with hundreds killed since 1989. By targeting scholars like Sumantra Bose, whose Kashmir at the Crossroads seeks pathways to peace, the administration alienates Kashmiris further. The LG’s unilateral action, bypassing the elected government and the central government’s contradictory cultural initiatives undermine reconciliation. The ban exposes a timeless trait of power: distrust of the people it claims to serve.
Terms like ‘false narratives’ and ‘secessionism’ are highly misinterpretable depending on who is using them, when. Banning books means not much these days on the ground, as they can be accessed freely from ether, as it were. On the other hand, if the government is correct and somehow some books have been found threatening the integrity of the country, why have they been in circulation for so long? Equally, will there be more old books to be discovered and damned as time goes by? As of now, all the government seems to have done is to ensure that these books have found a fresh lease of life.
C P Surendran | Poet, novelist and screenplay writer whose latest novel is One Love and the Many Lives of Osip B
(Views are personal)
(cpsurendran@gmail.com)