“They stripped us like animals. My daughter was in the next room.” This line appears in Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora?, a testimonial account authored by Kashmiri women and researchers that documents the mass rape of civilians by Indian armed forces during a midnight military operation in 1991 – an atrocity Human Rights Watch assessed as having up to 100 survivors.

On August 5, this book was officially banned by an order in India-administered Kashmir, one among 25 titles the Narendra Modi-led BJP government has now outlawed.

The banned works span archival history, political non-fiction, reportage, academic scholarship, and resistance literature, collectively mapping the violence, illegal occupation, militarisation, and political subjugation of a UN-recognised disputed territory.

Within hours of the ban, police raided bookstores across the valley, including the Chinar Book Festival in Srinagar, where nearly 200 stalls had been set up, a festival inaugurated only a week earlier by the same Lieutenant Governor – the federal government’s representative –  who ordered the seizures.

Many of the confiscated books were written by acclaimed historians, Booker Prize winners, and authors whose work has shaped public and scholarly understandings of Kashmir’s dispute and prolonged military occupation.

India’s war on books, as custodian of colonial legality in Kashmir, is not a spontaneous act of censorship but a calculated instrument of control, a state-engineered campaign to invisibilise a people’s history, criminalise their testimonies, and eliminate the archival record that could one day hold the occupation to account.

Earlier this year, police in civilian attire seized 670 books in a series of raids across the valley, reigniting debate over mounting censorship in the region.

Among those confiscated were works linked to Abul Ala Maududi, the influential Muslim scholar and founder of Jamaat-e-Islami in 1941, whose prolific writings, recognised with the first Faisal Award for Islamic literature, have shaped Islamic political thought from South Asia to the broader Muslim world.

In the logic of the Indian state, such works are not banned because they distort history, but because they threaten its monopoly over how history, identity, and political destiny are imagined in a territory under occupation.

Lawfare as occupation

Since the revocation of Kashmir's semi-autonomous status in 2019, the Indian state has entered a transitional phase of settler colonialism, one in which land is not merely seized, but violence is reorganised through law.

More than 890 new statutes are now in force, either legitimising illegal settlements or codifying a new order of surveillance and control.

This legal and spatial architecture resembles the panopticon imagined by Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century: a system designed not only to watch but to discipline, rendering the watched complicit in their subjugation.

Alongside the physical occupation, attacks on free expression and press freedom have escalated sharply. According to rights monitors, archives of major Kashmiri outlets, Greater Kashmir, Rising Kashmir, and the Kashmir Reader, have been partially or entirely erased, while the pre-2019 digital record of many smaller Urdu and English-language papers has vanished altogether.

Journalists suspect this purge is no accident: in a territory where enforced disappearances have long been used to erase the evidence of crimes, the deletion of newspaper archives functions as the disappearance of history itself. 

By extinguishing the record of a particular time, when the armed forces perpetrated grave international crimes, the occupation ensures that both the witnesses and their words are made invisible.

Targeting the institutions of memory

This war on Kashmiri memory has not been confined to books.

The Institute of Kashmir Studies (IKS), which painstakingly documented incidents from the 1990s, saw its archives banned and seized; its office bearers were arrested and tortured in detention centres.

The Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP), a body committed to memory and justice, has documented more than 8,000 cases of enforced disappearance, findings repeatedly endorsed in multiple reports by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Its Srinagar office was raided, and its entire archive of evidence was confiscated.

The Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS) faced targeted bans, with its operational space dismantled and its head, award-winning human rights defender Khurram Parvez, arrested under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. Without any formal order, all digital archives from his office were seized as “incriminating material”.

Colonial regimes have always understood that legitimacy is secured not only through territorial control but also through the domination of narrative.

What is distinct today is how that same logic is disguised beneath the bland vocabulary of administrative governance, where book bans, curriculum purges, and publishing blacklists are reframed as neutral, technocratic “internal matters”.

In this formulation, censorship becomes procedure, repression becomes regulation, and state violence is rendered legal, rational, and routine.

Weaponising legality

Among the 25 newly proscribed titles are memoirs, oral histories, and testimonial literature-the quiet weapons of a people denied narrative sovereignty. 

This repression has a traceable architect: Lieutenant General Ata Hasnain, a former top commander of the army unit that oversees military operations in the Kashmir valley. In 2018, he had famously declared that “We can’t win in Kashmir unless we have a counter-narrative.”

This was not a passing remark but the articulation of a doctrine: when counterinsurgency failed to secure legitimacy, India redirected its strategy toward counter-history, the deliberate re-engineering of collective memory to erase inconvenient truths and replace them with an authorised narrative.

In the world’s most militarised zone, this project has meant that literature is not simply contested but actively dismantled, stripped away page by page, voice by voice, until the only version of the past left in circulation is the one curated by the occupier.

As Benedict Anderson reminds us, nations are imagined into being through the circulation of books and newspapers; to ban them is not merely to silence dissent, but to extinguish the very imaginative space from which alternative political futures might be conceived.

Kashmir occupies an exceptional register of repression, where law itself is conscripted into the service of erasure. The ban order exemplifies what legal scholars describe as "hyper-legality," where the state weaponises law not to ensure justice but to entrench domination.

The question of whether the most marginalised can truly speak, and be heard, remains painfully alive in Kashmir. 

Here, testimonies emerge through memoirs, oral histories, and carefully preserved archives, yet these voices are intercepted, redacted, or erased by the very structures that claim to safeguard rights.

The dominant rights framework, detached from its colonial origins, too often distorts or appropriates the experiences of the oppressed, repackaging them into state-sanctioned narratives of “peace” and “development.”

In the language of international law, the principle of free expression cannot be divorced from the asymmetries of power in which it was forged. 

In Kashmir, those asymmetries are visible in the selective application of constitutional protections, the suppression of indigenous historical narratives, and the criminalisation of intellectual resistance.

These bans are not isolated acts of censorship; they form part of a continuum of occupation, where controlling memory is essential to controlling the future.