The Hindu State Use Force to Alter the History of Occupied Kashmir

News:

“SRINAGAR: The counter-intelligence wing of the Jammu and Kashmir Police has raided the premises of publishing houses after registering an FIR over two books allegedly glorifying separatist figures that were procured for government school libraries under the Samagra Shiksha programme.” (Kashmir Life News Network - July 5, 2026).

Comment:

A state apparatus mobilizes its counter-intelligence wing — the same organ tasked with tracking militancy — against library books meant for schoolchildren, is not an act of law and order. It is a confession to crime. It is the confession of an occupying entity that knows its narrative cannot survive contact with the memory of the people it rules. When a regime dispatches police to raid publishing houses over the mere mention of Maqbool Bhat or Syed Ali Shah Geelani in a book of legends, it tells us plainly: this is not sovereignty defending itself from falsehood, it is subjugation defending itself from truth.

Consider what is being criminalized. Not incitement. Not violence. A book. A page. A name remembered by a people whose sons were hanged, whose leaders were imprisoned, whose history is inconvenient to the occupier’s chosen story of normalcy in Kashmir. That such a book could pass through official government procurement — the Samagra Shiksha programme itself, a scheme of the very state now raiding over it — and then within days, trigger Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) proceedings, suspensions, and blacklisting, exposes the fragility beneath the show of control. Any legitimate authority does not fear the history of the people it governs. Only an occupier haunted by the possibility that its subjects might read their own history and recognize themselves in it reaches instead for the raid, criminal charges, the blacklist.

This is the pattern, not the exception. Last year it was Arundhati Roy and Sumantra Bose forfeited from shelves. This year it is schoolbooks recalled and their publishers treated as suspects in a terrorism case. Each cycle narrows further what a Muslims child in Kashmir may know of his own land, his own martyrs, his own history — and once free, now administered as contested territory. whose very name in a book “India Occupied Kashmir” cited as an alarm, is enough to summon the machinery of the state. The occupier does not merely rule the land; it seeks to author the memory of those who live on it.

Herein lies the deeper lesson for the one who reflects: a system built on colonial secular nationalism has no answer to legitimacy except suppression. It cannot argue its case in the open marketplace of ideas, because the case does not hold. So, it substitutes force for argument, raids for rebuttal, blacklists for debate. This is not particular to Kashmir — it is the standing condition of every ruling order divorced from justice, forever at war with the pen, the page, and the free man who dares to remember.