The J&K government’s ban on 25 books in the name of public order is all about policing thought and erasing accounts inconvenient to the state; it does not just target the writers, but readers as well.
On August 5 (Thursday), the Jammu & Kashmir Home Department did something that belongs in a darker, less democratic chapter of history: it banned 25 books. The official notification, signed by Principal Secretary Chandraker Bharti on the orders of Lieutenant-Governor Manoj Sinha, declared these titles “forfeited” because they allegedly push “false narratives” and “secessionism” in Kashmir.
The government’s claim is that these books could “radicalise youth” and that they “promote grievance” and even “glorify terrorists.” It’s not difficult to see that it’s a ludicrous, sweeping accusation against published research, memoir, political history, and investigative journalism. The act, in stroke, aims to erase the writing produced by world-renowned scholars and journalists on the grounds that challenging the state’s narrative is “a threat to sovereignty.”
The ban, of course, is being justified through legal provisions in the Bhartiya Nyaya Sanhita 2023 and the Bhartiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita 2023, along with rhetoric about “distorting history” and “vilifying security forces.” But underneath the legalese is something simpler and far more corrosive: fear of an informed public. When governments fear what citizens might think after reading a book, what it seeks to do is control over their minds. And that’s, for lack of a better word, dangerous.
The targets: An international roll call
Censorship in Kashmir is not new. Since 1947, the state — whether under Dogra monarchy, Indian administration, or Governor’s Rule — has sought to control the flow of information. But the 2025 list feels different in scale. The list of banned titles, far from being a fringe pile of pamphlets, is astonishing in its range: academic research, constitutional analysis, reportage, gender studies, and political history. It’s a list that spans continents: Indian constitutional expert A. G. Noorani’s forensic legal history, Harvard historian Sugata Bose’s regional analysis, Pakistani academic Mohd Yosuf Saraf’s political chronicle, and Stanford scholar Hafsa Kanjwal’s study of state-building.
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It includes deeply reported fieldwork like Anuradha Bhasin’s A Dismantled State and David Devadas’s In Search of a Future, as well as feminist testimony from Essar Batool and Ather Zia on the Kunan Poshpora mass rape case and enforced disappearances (Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora?) By targeting both local and global voices, the state signals that no perspective outside its official lens will be tolerated, regardless of how rigorously it’s researched or how widely it’s acclaimed abroad.
Though these books are academic, personal, and to an extent polemical, what unites them is that they are inconvenient for the government as they do not defer to the state’s preferred version of events. The government’s justification hinges on a chain of assumptions. First: that the books distort history. Second: that this distortion creates grievance. Third: that grievance leads to terrorism. Each link is treated as self-evident, without presenting public evidence for any of it.
Take Noorani’s The Kashmir Dispute: 1947–2012. It’s a work of constitutional and diplomatic history — dense, footnoted, and heavily factual. You can disagree with Noorani’s conclusions, but the idea that such a book is a “pathway to terrorism” is intellectually absurd. Or Kanjwal’s Colonizing Kashmir, which is a work of historical scholarship published by Stanford University Press. If peer-reviewed research by a US university press is “secessionist propaganda,” then the category is meaningless, to say the least. This is the blunt edge of the ban: it considers critique as sedition. The moment the state decides it can define alternative readings of history or feminist testimonies as security risks, there is no limiting principle left.
The policing of ideas
The ban is being enforced with the machinery of law and order. Police have been raiding bookshops in Srinagar, Ganderbal, Anantnag, Kulgam, Pulwama, Shopian, and Baramulla. Stock has been seized. Owners have been warned. And in an extraordinary display of bureaucratic thoroughness not evident in matters concerning the welfare of the people, the administration has invoked Section 98 of the Bhartiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita to formally forfeit every copy in circulation.
This isn’t just about preventing new publications, but about erasing what’s already out there. That’s a different level of control. It means that even private libraries and personal collections (some of these books are out of print and not easily available) are, in theory, illegal if they contain these titles. The state is reaching into the shelves of people to decide what is permissible to own. And the scale of the enforcement shows the intent. It’s a policing of ideas.
Predictably, the ban has its defenders. BJP leader Darakshan Andrabi declared that “terrorism spreads through the pen too,” as if equating the power of writing with the destructiveness of explosives were a sound argument. In this logic, the state has not just the right but the duty to police thought before it can turn into action.
By controlling which histories and accounts can circulate, the state gets to define what “Kashmir” means for those too young to remember the 1990s or even the pre-2019 autonomy era.
But opposition leaders have pushed back. Mehbooba Mufti argued that banning books will “only fuel division” and that “democracy thrives on the free exchange of ideas.” The CPI-M condemned the move as “a brazen attack on freedom of expression,” while the National Conference asked the obvious: if these works are so dangerous, why not release the evidence and let people judge?
The stakes beyond Kashmir
Censorship of this kind — at a time when books are preserved for posterity in digital forms on devices like Kindle — is not a sign of confidence. It’s the opposite. A state secure in its legitimacy does not need to snatch books off shelves. It can engage with them, rebut them, or simply let them fade if they lack merit. The only reason to ban scholarship is fear that the official narrative cannot withstand scrutiny.
This is also about monopoly. By controlling which histories and accounts can circulate, the state gets to define what “Kashmir” means for those too young to remember the 1990s or even the pre-2019 autonomy era. It’s a future-proofing exercise: make sure that tomorrow’s citizens inherit only one version of the past.
History, however, shows that bans rarely work as intended. In the age of PDFs, VPNs, and encrypted messaging, the idea that you can truly suppress a text is naive. What you can do is make it more sought-after, more illicit, and more widely discussed. The J & K Home Department and the Centre should know that there is something called The Streisand Effect.
If we think that this is just a “Kashmir issue,” we could not be more wrong. Once you normalise banning books in one region, the precedent travels. The same legal rationale could be used tomorrow in Punjab, Manipur, or anywhere else the state decides a narrative is “false” or “alienating.” And once you blur the line between violent incitement and historical critique, there’s no stopping that logic from swallowing up any form of dissent.
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It also damages India’s standing abroad. Democracies are judged not just by their elections but by their tolerance for all shades of views. When international scholars like Hafsa Kanjwal or Victoria Schofield find their work criminalised in India, it sends a message that the world’s largest democracy is increasingly allergic to the academic freedoms it once touted. Also, the ban gives easy ammunition to critics who claim India cannot handle honest debate about Kashmir. You can disagree with them, but banning books hands them the talking points on a silver platter.
An attempt to manage the optics of peace
The ban does not target only those titles with ‘militant religious’ content — like Syed Abul A’la Maududi’s Al Jihad fil Islam (The Concept of Jihad in Islam) or Hasan al-Banna’s Mujahid ki Azan (The Call to Prayer of a Holy Warrior), but, as mentioned earlier, sweeps up feminist accounts of sexual violence, legal treatises, and policy analysis. That is the thin end of the wedge: once you accept that legal history is a threat, anything can be. And that “anything” will, inevitably, expand. Today it’s Kashmir. Tomorrow it could be books on caste violence, on the 2002 Gujarat riots, on the farmers’ protests, on climate activism. Once you set the precedent that the state decides what citizens can think about a contested issue, there is no natural limit.
That is why even those with no interest in Kashmir should care. Because censorship doesn’t stop at the borders of the dispute, it creeps into every contested space. The government insists this is about preventing violence. But the real battleground here is the mind. A population that can think critically about its history is harder to govern through fear. A population that reads only state-approved material is easier to manipulate, manoeuvre. Either we accept that citizens are adults capable of handling disagreement or we reduce them to wards of the state, shielded from “dangerous” thoughts like children kept from matches. Banning books doesn’t erase the realities they describe. It just ensures that fewer people understand them.
In the final analysis, the target is not just the writers, but readers as well. The government is telling the latter that their mind is a danger to the state. And once a government crosses that line, the problem is no longer what’s in the book, it’s what’s in the government’s own head. On paper, the justification for such bans comes down to ‘maintaining public order.’ But this phrase is notoriously elastic; it has been used in India to justify everything from internet shutdowns to the arrest of comedians. In the Kashmir context, ‘public order’ is less about keeping the peace and more about managing the optics of peace.
