Angana P. Chatterji discusses how the recent book ban in India reflects a broader project of censorship and militarized control.
A blog post in Verso, Aug 22, 2025
Assault on Refusal
Exactly six years after India’s advance of neo-colonial settlerism in Kashmir, on August 5, 2025, the Government of Jammu and Kashmir’s Home Department, (under the union territory administration) issued Statutory Order 203 against 25 books. SO203 alleges that the banned 25 “propagate false narrative and secessionism” and jeopardize the “sovereignty and integrity of India”. What are the insinuations against the authors and readers of these texts? Reportedly acting on the command of New Delhi, SO203 decrees the forfeiture of the banned 25 in Jammu and Kashmir, prohibits their publication and circulation, and by extension, the reading of these texts. This proscription of intellectual discourse is foremost an attack on Kashmir’s resistance-subjectivity and refusal. In decreeing censorship, the Indian government has signalled yet again that it fears critique and will not tolerate the free exchange of ideas.
Many among the banned 25 are integral to the body of emancipatory work on Kashmir, including a courageous narration on Kunan Poshpora, together with a profusion of related literature in poetry, fiction, accounts, articles, special issues, memoirs, reports and investigations from writers in Kashmir, its diasporas and allies. Leading among them are works enabled by local knowledge [MOU1] that reflect Kashmir’s storied cultures of intellect, hospitality and resistance to tyranny. Included in the banned 25 is Kashmir: The Case for Freedom by Tariq Ali, Hilal Bhat, Angana P. Chatterji, Pankaj Mishra and Arundhati Roy. Its title, spotlighting the subject of freedom, and the diversity of its writers, predisposes The Case for Freedom to invisibility and hostility from majoritarian advocates in India.
The banned 25 enter the queue of previously targeted work on Kashmir. Among the publishers of the banned 25, Verso’s response was immediate and resolute. While various media reported on the issues in India and beyond, only a few institutions have spoken out to focus on substantive concerns. Those in Kashmir who might protest the book ban, would do so at grave risk. The Indian state has policed and punished free speech in Kashmir for decades, victimizing activists, academics, writers, civil society leaders and members, teachers, students, human rights defenders, researchers, journalists, politicians and lawyers.
Kashmir is one of the world’s most militarized conflict zones. A Muslim-majority region, many there understand themselves to be under protracted Indian occupation. Kashmir is a monument to impunity laws, enforced disappearances, gendered and sexualized violence, displacement, torture, extrajudicial executions, as well as the burial of civilians in unknown, unmarked and mass graves. Adjacently, issues pertaining to Hindu Pandits of Kashmir are weaponized to divaricate Muslim and Pandit communities.
The rise of [MOU2] political majoritarianism in India escalated following the Emergency of 1975-77, the Gujarat pogrom of 2002 and after, culminating in the election of the Narendra Modi-led Hindu nationalist government in 2014 and its re-election in 2019 and 2024. Building on this history, the Modi administration commenced theAugust 2019 siege on Kashmir’s remnant autonomy followed by demographic manipulation and land grab to destabilize Kashmiri entitlements to their land. The state’s determination to wrest absolute control over Kashmir’s political future and economy prompted (and in large part has normalized) internet and media lockdowns, the suppression of freedoms and the disciplining of social institutions and resistance.