The government in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir has banned 25 books, including works by the Booker-prize winning author Arundhati Roy, accusing them of promoting a “false narrative and secessionism” in the disputed territory.
The censorship order was issued by Manoj Sinha, the lieutenant governor of Jammu and Kashmir, who was appointed by the ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) under the prime minister, Narendra Modi. Sinha was previously a minister in Modi’s BJP government.
According to the directive issued by Jammu and Kashmir’s home ministry on Sinha’s instructions, it had “come to the notice of the government, that certain literature propagates false narrative and secessionism in Jammu and Kashmir”.
The 25 books named in the order range from historical narratives of the region by well-known academics, historians and journalists, both from Kashmir and abroad, to documentation of human rights atrocities committed in Kashmir.
Jammu and Kashmir is one of the most heavily militarised territories in the world. The Kashmir region has been disputed by Indian and Pakistan since independence, with the two countries controlling parts of it.
Since the 1990s, Indian-ruled Kashmir has been home to a militant separatist insurgency and a long-running campaign by Indian forces to crack down on militancy has led to accusations of widespread abuses carried out with impunity including enforced disappearances, tens of thousands of killings and a crushing of freedom of expression under draconian laws. The Indian government has denied the accusations.
Roy’s book Azadi, which includes essays on the thousands allegedly killed and disappeared in Kashmir by Indian forces in recent decades, and Independent Kashmir by the Australian political scientist Christopher Snedden, which explores the Kashmiri fight for independence, were among the banned books.
Other titles the government ordered to be banned from publication and forfeited by all bookshops in the region included Colonizing Kashmir: State-building Under Indian Occupation by the US-based academic Hafsa Kanjwal and Contested Lands: Israel-Palestine, Kashmir, Bosnia, Cyprus and Sri Lanka by Sumantra Bose, a professor at the London School of Economics.
The government alleged that the content of the books “would deeply impact the psyche of youth by promoting a culture of grievance, victimhood and terrorist heroism”. The order accused the works of glorifying terrorists, distorting history and promoting violence and claimed they had “contributed to the radicalisation of youth in Jammu and Kashmir”.
Authors named in the order expressed frustration at their works being censored in the very region they addressed. Angana Chatterji, a scholar at University of California, Berkeley, who co-authored the now-banned Kashmir: The Case for Freedom, said the order “underscores the state’s intent to criminalise scholarship and render it seditious”.
“The symbolic and material impact of this ban stands to be extensive,” said Chatterji. “It restimulates psychological operations to terrify and isolate Kashmiris, and silence their pain and resistance.”
She alleged that the decree of censorship was part of a wider agenda by the Indian government to “erase the decades-long history of state violence, terror, and impunity in Kashmir”. The order, she added, had “signalled that it fears critique and will not tolerate the free exchange of ideas”.
Allegations of attacks on free expression and press freedom in Jammu and Kashmir have mounted since 2019, when the Modi-led government unilaterally stripped Kashmir of its decades-long autonomy and statehood, brought it fully under the control of the central government and began a widespread crackdown on dissent. In February, police in Kashmir raided dozens of bookshops and seized more than 650 books, alleging they promoted a “banned ideology”.
