'Erasing historical facts': India orders massive crackdown on books in Kashmir's libraries
Authorities in Indian-administered Kashmir have ordered a multi-level audit across all public libraries and educational institutions to purge books and digital archives flagged as "anti-national" or "glorifying terrorism".
The move has drawn sharp reaction from scholars and residents of Kashmir, who argue that the region’s academic freedom is being systematically destroyed.
In an order issued by the authorities earlier this month, the Jammu and Kashmir administration, which is directly appointed by New Delhi, called for “an audit of all books, journals, supplementary reading material, reference books, periodicals and other educational resources available in the libraries or learning resource centres.
“The exercise shall extend to the entire library collection," the order reads.
"No publication containing objectionable, inflammatory or inappropriate content, including any material promoting or glorifying extremism, violence, secessionism, anti-national ideology or otherwise prejudicial to the sovereignty, unity and integrity of the Union of India, shall be procured, recommended, retained, circulated or otherwise made available in the libraries or academic premises of the institutions,” it says.
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The region-wide audit was triggered by objections by members of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) over the content of two books, following which the Jammu and Kashmir administration ordered the immediate withdrawal of the titles, which had been distributed to over 250 schools across the region.
The books, Personalities and Legends of Jammu and Kashmir, written by Hilal Ahmad and Santosh Meena and published by Oberoi Book Service, Jammu and Kashmir, and Great Personalities of Jammu and Kashmir, written by Dr Sushant Giri and published by Anurag Prakashan, New Delhi, were distributed to schools across the region under the government-funded Samagra Shiksha scheme.
'The government has been keeping an increasingly close and continuous watch on what gets written, printed and read in Kashmir'
- Ahmad, research scholar
The BJP leader of the opposition in the region, Sunil Sharma, said the texts of the books employed terminology like "Indian-occupied Kashmir", and labelled their presence in school libraries "a direct challenge to India's sovereignty and territorial integrity". Sharma branded their inclusion an act of "academic jihad" aimed at indoctrinating young minds.
Following the protest, the region’s administrative head, Manoj Sinha, suspended eight officials of the School Education Department and ordered a formal investigation into the issue and the authors.
Both publishers have since been blacklisted, with orders that any other material they had published previously should also be withdrawn from circulation.
Pro-freedom leaders as 'martyrs'
The outrage among BJP leaders stemmed from a few entries in the 240-page book Personalities and Legends of Jammu and Kashmir, which profiled writers like Salman Rushdie and Hari Kunzru in addition to pro-freedom leaders.
The book called Maqbool Bhat, founder of the armed group Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, a "Shaheed", or martyr. Bhat was hanged after being sentenced to death by the Indian Supreme Court, following which his body was buried secretly inside Tihar jail in New Delhi.
The book also quoted late resistance leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani describing Kashmir as a "disputed region awaiting political resolution under the UN".
Details regarding the contents of the second audited book remain unavailable.
This is not the first time the New Delhi-appointed administration in Kashmir has gone after books. In August 2025 the authorities banned 25 books, declaring them "forfeited" to the state under India's criminal law.
Among the titles targeted were foundational political texts like AG Noorani’s The Kashmir Dispute and Victoria Schofield’s Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unending War, alongside Arundhati Roy’s essay collection Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction.
Major scholarly works, including Sumantra Bose’s Contested Lands and Kashmir at the Crossroads, Hafsa Kanjwal’s Colonising Kashmir: State-Building Under Indian Occupation, and Anuradha Bhasin’s post-2019 chronicle A Dismantled State, were also flagged, along with Christopher Snedden’s Independent Kashmir.
State-enforced ideology
Kashmiri scholars caution that the current library audit is not just an isolated policy move, but rather the latest iteration of state-enforced ideological boundaries in the region.
Dr Ather Zia, professor of anthropology and gender studies at the University of Northern Colorado, Greeley, whose own work, Resisting Disappearances, was among those flagged, characterised the audit as an effort to enforce compliance.
“To me, the removal of so-called 'objectionable material' is not a new thing but part of a continuity in the long history of censorship and suppressing critical thinking and scholarship in Kashmir,” Zia told Middle East Eye.
“It is meant to reinforce the systemic erasure of grounded knowledges and histories of people. Any normal and intellectually healthy society operates on dissent, disagreements and critique, and examining difficult histories and multiple perspectives openly," Zia said.
"Once again, this extreme purge, which is recurring and roots out any form of dissenting or critical voice from academic and mainstream discourse, points to democratic engagement in Kashmir being a true illusion," she added.
"It tells us about a system that demands extreme compliance of thought and deed to survive, and has normalised repression."
Pro-freedom leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq posted on X that banning books "will not erase historical facts and the repertoire of lived memories of people of Kashmir”.
Last year, police also raided bookstores, walking in with a printed list of titles, clearing shops of customers, and seizing copies of blacklisted books off the shelves.
In February 2025, authorities had confiscated Islamic literature from bookshops and homes across the valley.
“The government has been keeping an increasingly close and continuous watch on what gets written, printed and read in Kashmir,” said Ahmad, a 27-year-old research scholar of media studies in Kashmir, who did not want to be identified by his first name.
Crackdown since 2019
After the BJP-led government unilaterally abrogated Article 370 – which ensured a semi-autonomous status to the restive region – in August 2019, there has been a steady campaign of regulating literature and thought by the Indian military and administration.
The law barred non-Kashmiris from owning land as a measure to protect the region's delicate ecology and resources, while regulating jobs, ensuring local employment and providing constitutional guarantees for limited political decision-making.
Since the Indian parliament decided to strip away that protective measure, Indian enforcement agencies have been involved in high-tech surveillance, increasing the powers of the police, and harsh measures against the local press, human rights workers and political dissidents.
India has also introduced draconian laws to allow Indians to settle in Kashmir, while dividing the region into multiple administrative territories to be governed directly from New Delhi.
Since 1947, when the partition of the British colony of India led to the emergence of two nations, India and Pakistan, the Kashmir region of the Himalayas has been one of the most contested territories in the world.
The region is claimed entirely by both countries, which have since become nuclear powers, each of which controls only parts of the territory. The geopolitical tussle has resulted in multiple wars, years-long escalations along the border between the states, and an armed uprising by the people in Kashmir.
Indian-administered Kashmir has been termed the most militarised region in the world, where state repression continues to impact the lives of millions of its residents.
Censorship and fear
Dean Accardi, a historian at Connecticut College who has authored extensive scholarly work on Kashmir, told MEE that government censorship of books or other publications "almost always occurs when those in power fear public opposition to their policies or regime altogether.
“Rather than addressing the sources of the people’s discontent," he said, "censorship aims to decrease public knowledge of facts on such matters as well as open public debate, replacing these core constituents of any true, open democracy with propaganda and punishment in the name of ‘security’.
“The history of Kashmir and its people involves great conflict and often troubling, uncomfortable truths," Accardi said. "The state should not attempt to suppress those truths through censorship but instead address them openly and make things better for Kashmiris.”
Goldie Osuri, a sociologist and scholar of critical Kashmir studies at the University of Warwick, said that following the ban of 25 books last year, it seems that “we are witnessing an ongoing war against any academic material” that might differ from the Indian state's narratives where it concerns Kashmir.
“The Indian state, it seems, cannot brook any narrative that attests to Kashmiri contestation of Indian rule," Osuri said. "In essence, this is a war against academic freedom. If academic work can only serve ‘national’ interest, then it cannot be called academic work. And schools and universities cannot be understood any more as genuine places of learning.
"Where it concerns academic material, it seems that educational institutions are being forced to serve as checkpoints for the Indian state rather than places where students can be exposed to differing narratives and understand the contexts for these differing narratives," she added.
The fear of the audit is already felt inside homes across Kashmir, where many people are silently destroying their own private archives.
Among them is Nafees, a government employee and avid reader who recently emptied his shelves of works on Kashmir, political history and Islam.
“Some of these were part of my late father’s collection,” Nafees told MEE. “I didn't want to give them away, but as a government worker, I couldn't risk keeping them. Fear has taken over. You never know what excuse the authorities might find to trouble you.”
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