Shelf by shelf: Inside Kashmir’s sweeping search for forbidden pages

A dispute over two slim volumes on regional history has set off what officials call the largest academic content review in the territory’s history, sending librarians scrambling through thousands of titles before month-end deadlines.

A librarian at a Srinagar college pulled another book from the shelf, checked the spine, and set it aside for closer scrutiny.

Thousands more waited behind her, stacked in rows that stretched the length of the reading room.

She had been told to examine them one by one, and she knew the work would take weeks.

“There are thousands of books in the library, and it will take considerable time to examine them,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Any book found to contain objectionable content will be withdrawn from the college library.”

Her task is now shared by librarians, deans and department heads at universities, colleges, schools and coaching centres throughout Jammu and Kashmir, who have been ordered to inspect every volume on their shelves and every file in their digital repositories.

The goal, according to the union territory’s administration, is to strip out material that promotes secessionism, extremism or what officials describe broadly as anti-national ideology.

The sweeping order traces back to a single discovery that set the state machinery in motion.

A copy of Personalities and Legends of J&K, by Dr. Hilal Ahmad and Santosh Meena and published by the Jammu-based Oberoi Book Service, surfaced in the Central Library of the University of Jammu.

Among its entries were Maqbool Bhat, founder of the JKLF and executed in Delhi’s Tihar Jail in 1984, Muslim League leader Masrat Alam, the late Tehreek-e-Hurriyat chairman Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Democratic Freedom Party chairman Shabir Ahmad Shah, and Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, head of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference.

The book also referred to the region as “India Occupied” and “India Held,” phrasing the government regards as a direct challenge to its sovereignty claims.

A second book, Great Personalities of Jammu and Kashmir, by Dr. Suhant Giri, published by the Delhi-based Aurora Prakashan, drew similar scrutiny.

Word of the books reached Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha, who convened a high-level meeting on July 8. He directed departments to build a permanent mechanism ensuring that books, journals and other publications containing separatist or objectionable material never again reach a university shelf, a school library or a private college reading room.

Educational institutions, he told the gathering, exist to build the nation and instil constitutional values, and he described zero tolerance for anything that might mislead or radicalise students.

LG Sinha also ordered officials to comb through university websites and online repositories for objectionable files and delete them on sight.

What followed was a bureaucratic mobilisation on a scale the territory has rarely seen.

The School Education Department instructed institutions under its watch to check whether books are academically sound, factually correct, aligned with the prescribed curriculum and free of content tied to terrorism or extremism.

Anything that fails the test gets pulled from circulation and locked away pending further orders.

A four-tier chain of accountability now runs from individual schools up through district offices, directorates and the department itself, with heads of institutions personally answerable for the results.

The review will happen once this year and then repeat annually.

The Higher Education Department issued a nearly identical framework for degree colleges and publicly funded libraries, folding in digital resources alongside printed volumes.

Its three-tier structure gives colleges until July 26 to finish combing their shelves, after which the Director of Colleges must deliver a consolidated report by July 31.

But as the pressure of looming deadlines intensified, Kashmir’s two flagship universities took markedly different paths.

At the University of Kashmir, Registrar Naseer Iqbal said the institution had been conducting similar checks well before the July directive.

“We have already been carrying out this exercise since last year,” he told Free Press Kashmir.

“Following the July 8 directive, we issued a circular asking all departments to conduct a comprehensive audit of their library collections, remove any objectionable material, if found, and submit an undertaking to my office.”

The University of Jammu took a sharper turn.

On July 14, once investigators confirmed a copy of the controversial title sat in the Central Library, the university banned the book outright and blacklisted its authors and publisher, along with those behind the second contested volume.

Taken together, the directives amount to something new for Jammu and Kashmir: a formal, recurring inspection regime touching schools, colleges, universities, coaching centres and public libraries alike, with deadlines, paperwork trails and personal accountability built into its design.

Officials call it protection against radicalisation, but librarians see an enormous undertaking measured in books.

Back at the city college, the shelves held their silence. Thousands of books remained in place, but what happened to them now depended less on who read them than on the names, ideas and histories they contained.

Sorting them became the work of the season, with librarians opening spines, checking title pages and deciding which books could stay.