“Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn people.” Fortunately, we are not yet at the book burning stage in Jammu and Kashmir. However, the J&K home department’s recent notification banning 25 books is a serious matter that must not go unnoticed.

For many years, there has been a consistent effort to make uniformity the central idea of a “New India”. Perspectives that didn’t fit, were inconvenient, or which challenged the narrative hegemony of the state or the ruling party were systematically targeted as being “anti-national”. J&K’s book banning order appears to be part of that broader effort to enforce uniformity. It is unwelcome, it will be counterproductive, and India will be worse for it. 

Since we started with Heinrich Heine’s famous line from his play Almansor, it’s only fitting to talk briefly about book burning.

Heine, a German Jewish poet, fled Germany for France in 1831 as antisemitism and  censorship took hold in Germany. Heine’s play, Almansor, refers to the burning of the Quran in Granada after the Christian reconquest of Spain – but the line became prophetic when Nazi students burned books (including Heine’s own) in 1933. Today, at Bebelplatz in Berlin, the Empty Library stands as a memorial, with Heine’s famous line included. Germany remembers Heine, the Nazis be damned. 

On August 5, the J&K home department issued a notification stating that “…it has come to the attention of the Government, that certain literature propagates false narrative and secessionism” in J&K. The notification goes on to assert that “…a significant driver behind youth participation in violence and terrorism has been the systematic dissemination of false narratives and secessionist literature by its persistent internal circulation.” The banned books were “…found to excite secessionism and endangering sovereignty and integrity of India.”

Three questions come to mind.

First, what books are these that are exciting secessionism in J&K?

Second, who are these delinquent authors that hate India so much?

Finally, when did young Kashmiris find time from their Instagram and Facebook accounts to take up revolutionary books with which to wage war? Aren’t we glad our government promptly swung into action to save us from anti-national exciters of secession!

The list includes works that explore the Kashmir conflict through historical, political, and sociological lenses. I am familiar with many of them. Books like A.G. Noorani’s The Kashmir Dispute or Victoria Schofield’s Kashmir in Conflict are well known in intellectual circles and certainly not written from a revolutionary perspective. Most books are academic in nature. There are some that are written from perspectives that either oppose India’s claim over Kashmir or criticise India’s human rights record. But such books have been around for a while and that has not dismembered India. Maulana Maudoodi’s Al-Jihad fil-Islam was written in 1930, is influential in Islamist circles but that has not changed Kashmir’s status. 

What is intriguing is that the J&K government decided to ban these books on the anniversary of the reading down of Article 370 but had not felt the need to do so earlier.

None of these books is of recent vintage. Why ban these books now? What sense does it make and what intelligence report can credibly demonstrate that Kashmir youngsters are favouring dense text over Insta Reels?

One could even argue that if these books were indeed causing excitement of secession, the J&K government was derelict. Don’t we need protection from dangerous authors like Stephen Cohen (a great friend of India), Sumantra Bose (an authority on Kashmir), Sugata Bose (former MP and Harvard professor), Arundhati Roy (the global anti-national) and Anuradha Bhasin (journalist, friend and dangerous truth-teller) and others?

While we are on the topic of authors exciting secessionism in Kashmir, readers might be interested to know that A.G. Noorani presented a copy of The Kashmir Dispute to N.N. Vohra when he was Governor of J&K. Now, the Lieutenant Governor has banned a book that his senior predecessor warmly received. Strange are the ways of New India.

Also read: I Wonder Who Is the Bookworm Who Smelled ‘Sedition’ in the 25 Banned Books on Kashmir

While one may disagree with some of the authors, banning them is intellectually dishonest and has historically proven to be counterproductive. The instinct to suppress what is inconvenient or controversial is not new. History is replete with examples of book banning and worse. In 1933, the Nazis held public burnings of books by Jewish, socialist, and liberal authors. Yet, many of the banned writers – like Heinrich Heine and Sigmund Freud – are now celebrated, while their censors are remembered with shame. Likewise, Soviet-era bans on writers like Solzhenitsyn and Mandelstam failed to extinguish dissent, and we remember them for their work and courage.

And such bans may be counterproductive. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon and George Mason University found that banned books got a 12 percent boost in library circulation compared to a control group.  The researchers attributed this to the Streisand Effect (after Barbra Streisand), an unintended consequence of attempts to hide, remove, or censor information. 

India is a country of many truths, not just one. It is big enough to accommodate complexity—even contradiction. In this spirit, we must oppose the suppression of books not just on legal or academic grounds, but as a moral imperative.

As for young Kashmiris, I can only hope they read a lot more. We will all be better for it.

Salman Soz is an economist and author. His book Unshackling India (HarperCollins, 2021) was named one of the Best New Books in Economics for 2022 by the Financial Times.

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