Libraries on the Frontline of Censorship After Kashmir’s Book Ban

“If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.” 

— Noam Chomsky

On August 5, 2025, the Jammu & Kashmir Home Department, under Lt. Governor Manoj Sinha, declared 25 books forfeited under Section 98 of the newly enacted Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS), citing their propagation of “false narratives,” “secessionism,” and “glorification of terrorism”. Titles banned include Arundhati Roy’s Azadi, A.G. Noorani’s The Kashmir Dispute 1947–2012, Sumantra Bose’s Contested Lands, Anuradha Bhasin’s A Dismantled State, and works by Victoria Schofield, among others. Enforcement quickly followed: police conducted raids on bookstores, including at the Chinar Book Festival in Srinagar, and began seizing these works 

But history teaches us that suppression rarely extinguishes ideas; rather, it forces them underground, amplifies their allure, and reduces civic discourse to silence.

A Heritage of Suppression—and Subversion

Since colonial times, libraries in India have navigated a delicate balance between legal coercion and intellectual stewardship. The Indian Press Act of 1910 empowered the British to forfeit publications deemed seditious, seen as a response to the growing influence of nationalist journals such as Kesari, Jugantar, and Bande Mataram. Post-independence, “reasonable restrictions” under Article 19(2) of the Constitution and procedural sections like Section 95 of the CrPC (or its successor BNSS 2023) have sustained the state’s legal arsenal against dissenting literature.

Even celebrated titles like Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History, and works by Perumal Murugan have been banned, withdrawn, or pressured into silence, often with limited public justification.

In Jharkhand in 2017, the anthology The Adivasi Will Not Dance: Stories by Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar was banned and its author briefly suspended by the state government, citing offense to Santhal culture. The ban was lifted by December 2017, and Shekhar was reinstated in his position in 2018.

Yet librarians have historically refused to be mere conduits of erasure. During the Emergency (1975–77), when political dissent was actively suppressed, several libraries quietly retained censored materials in “closed collections.” Though inaccessible to the general public, these hidden archives later became invaluable for historians probing that repressive era.

Globally, the profession has fortified itself with ethical guardrails. The International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA), through its FAIFE initiative, broadly champions free access and safeguards librarians under threat.

In the United States, the American Library Association (ALA) has long defended books under challenge, with tools like collection development policies, the “Library Bill of Rights,” and annual Banned Books Week, designed not only to protest censorship but to ignite public conversation about intellectual freedom. Librarians have even used controversy as a driver: in one case, libraries began buying more materials on a censored topic to preempt charges of bias—an act of strategic resistance to forced exclusion.

Contemporary Tactics: Fear, Law, and Resilience

Today’s censorship is often less overt than bonfires or bans; it’s bureaucratic, ideological, and fast-moving. In the U.S., the last few years have seen an unprecedented surge in book challenges, driven by ideological lobbying groups, parental-rights rhetoric, and gag orders that reshape curricula and public library collections. Some states criminalize librarians’ work or defund libraries outright when collections include contested material.

Still, librarians resist, even if quietly. They develop robust reconsideration policies, maintain challenged works in archives, educate stakeholders without breaking the law, and implement collection strategies that uphold diversity while still satisfying governance mandates.

India’s Libraries at the Crossroads

The recent J&K order revives familiar questions: should librarians comply, or subtly preserve? The law compels removal, but professional ethics, as enshrined by bodies like IFLA, urge retention of suppressed knowledge in some form.

India’s fraught history includes the 1984 burning of the Sikh Reference Library during Operation Blue Star, an act that erased some 20,000+ books and manuscripts, leaving scholars impoverished ever since. The Wendy Doniger case demonstrated how legal pressure and nationalist outrage can compel wholesale withdrawal, with a Streisand effect that ironically boosted sales and raised public awareness.

Today, digital suppression, such as internet lockdowns and limited access to banned scholarly works in Kashmir, heightens the impact of physical bans.

What Librarians Can Do Now

Preserve—silently, strategically. Maintain banned works in restricted, catalogued stacks. Not for public borrowing, but for future scholarly access when legal conditions shift.

Document and archive. Record the censorship orders, public responses, and internal memos, creating a meta-archive of suppression itself that can become a part of historical memory. Panjab Digital Library has digitized over 85 million pages, including books, manuscripts, pamphlets, newspapers, maps, and letters, by late 2024, preserving heritage materials for posterity.

Educate, without breaking the law. Provide readers with context: explain “why this title is absent,” the constitutional tensions, and the value of suppressed narratives, turning absence into a teachable moment.

Offer alternatives. Recommend similarly themed works or balanced counterpoints, so readers’ inquiry isn’t halted, but redirected through legally available channels.

Network Silently. Build coalitions with academic libraries in other regions to share materials or research support through interlibrary collaborations.

Why This Matters for India’s Democratic Future

A democracy that shrouds ideas in silence is a democracy distorted. Book bans, like the one in J&K, do not eliminate ideas; they drive them underground, away from informed debate. 

Under the present political climate, this danger has grown sharper. The BJP government has overseen extensive revisions to NCERT history textbooks, erasing or diluting references to the Mughal era, caste struggles, and communal violence. Such rewriting narrows the historical imagination, leaving younger generations with a sanitized view of the past. The pressure extends beyond classrooms—school and college librarians often find themselves restricted to stocking only “approved” narratives, while some state governments have openly discouraged the circulation of material deemed “anti-national.” In this climate, libraries are at risk of becoming tools of ideological conformity rather than spaces of open inquiry.

This suppression of pluralism runs counter to the very foundations of Indian democracy. Ambedkar, in Annihilation of Caste, emphasized that democracy is not merely a political arrangement but “a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.” To flatten historical and cultural diversity is to betray this vision. Similarly, Nehru warned in The Discovery of India that India’s strength lay in its ability to absorb and reconcile differences rather than erase them. By narrowing what citizens can read, authoritarian impulses seek to undo this strength.

Meanwhile, librarians, often invisible, stand as custodians of thought. By quietly preserving, documenting, and contextualizing, they underwrite the very memory of democracy. They are not simply keepers of books—they are guardians of pluralism. And where law demands removal, they can still etch the story of suppression into the archive. Only then can forbidden books, and the ideas they carry, someday step light again into the light of democratic engagement.