Lieutenant-Governor Manoj Sinha has set an ignominious record by banning 25 books in one stroke in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir. Never before, anywhere in the world, has such a wholesale proscription of literature been carried out in one go. The police have been scouring bookshops and libraries, searching through piles of volumes to pull out the offending titles. Under the Bharatiya Nyaya Samhita, these works stand accused of “propagating false narratives and secessionism and terrorism.” The list of authors reads like a roll call of respected intellectuals and historians: Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy, constitutional scholar A.G. Noorani, historian Sumantra Bose, journalist David Devdas, former Kashmir Times........

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