Ink, irony and insecurity

IN THE DELICATE SCENARIO OF DEMOCRACY, literature bears witness but also wields a sword. If one is an observer of Indian politics, the Jammu & Kashmir Home Department's announcement in August 2025 of a ban on 25 books that it classified as "seditious" was hardly shocking. It felt less spontaneous than a psychological act of governance: a panicked retreat into a shroud of national integrity. Yet the more we peered inside this literary purge, we understood that it was not just the ink the state feared on the page but the imagination, the inquiry, the unforgetting histories it mobilised.

Many of the most respected names in Indian and global scholarship on this banned list are Arundhati Roy, A.G. Noorani, Sumantra Bose, and Victoria Schofield. These works are not incendiary pamphlets or flights of fancy calling for insurrection; they are scholarly texts, journalistic investigations, and political essays chronicling the long, tortuous, and too often tragic tale of Kashmir's contemporary political identity. The overarching authority's decision to ban their circulation and reader access was garbed in the usual threats to sovereignty and assertions that they promote terrorism. Yet, just the faintest breath of scrutiny reveals how predictable and uniform such proclamations are, and crumbles them effortlessly.

The legal rationale was provided under the new Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), 2023, which replaces the colonial Indian Penal Code (IPC). Among several offences invoked are Section 152 of BNS (forfeiture of publication with seditious matter) and Section 197 of BNS (promoting enmity between different groups). Some of these statutory instruments, which are merely brand new forms of old statutory systems based on colonial logic, have been used to imprison revolutionaries under British rule, when the same colonial understanding was a tool of the state's power to repress. What is remarkable about this situation is that a state that is supposedly post-colonial is borrowing from colonial frameworks to police intellect and academic thought, repressing dissenting voices and constructing understandings of loyalty in its shallow terms. This raises an important question: Is it possible for a republic to flourish if it is afraid of its writers?

The political precariousness evident in this decision does not come from nowhere. Since the stripping of Article 370 in 2019, Kashmir has been relentlessly undergoing a campaign of narrative consolidation. Kashmir had once become a polyphony, full of voices (local leaders, poets, historians, international observers), has now been reduced to a monologue - all organized from the control room in Delhi where the script is singular, and any deviation is now "anti-national," a term so often used that it has lost meaning altogether, its threat baritone is now an empty trumpet. In this one-note narrative environment, the banned books didn't get banned because they caused violence, but because they transpired the state-managed illusion of ideological unity. They reminded readers that there is more than one story, more than one pain, more than one way to be patriotic.