On September 3, the Jammu and Kashmir High Court issued a landmark ruling striking down the preventive detention order against 30-something Kashmiri research scholar Shafat Maqbool Wani, establishing a critical legal precedent that mere ownership of texts with politically charged or controversial titles cannot be classified as a criminal act, nor can it justify extrajudicial detention. Presiding Justice Moksha Khajuria Kazmi explicitly stated in her written judgment that “owning books with grim, provocative titles does not make their owner a criminal by default”, concluding that local administrative authorities had failed to produce any verifiable evidence of specific subversive activity that would legally warrant Wani’s detention under the draconian Public Safety Act (PSA) – a sweeping regional statute that permits administrative bodies to hold individuals without formal trial for up to two years in the name of state security.
The sequence of events leading to Wani’s detention stretches back months: Wani, a resident of the northern Kupwara district of Kashmir, was first arrested under the stringent Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), India’s flagship anti-terrorism legislation. A special National Investigation Agency court based in Jammu eventually granted him formal bail in that UAPA case, but on September 13, 2025 – the exact day he was set to be released – the Kupwara district magistrate issued a new detention order under the PSA, claiming Wani’s unspecified activities posed a threat “detrimental to state security”. The four formal grounds cited for the PSA detention included tangential references to his father’s alleged past association with a 1990s militant outfit before his formal surrender, invitations Wani had received to present original academic research at Columbia University in the U.S. and Dublin City University in Ireland, the pending UAPA case against him, and a cache of printed materials seized from his family home that authorities labelled “anti-national”. Among the seized texts were two volumes: *Construction of an Islamic Order in Hindutva Reimagination* and *The Saffronisation of Occupied Kashmir: Demystifying Hindutva Settlers, Colonial Designers*, which police had incorrectly attributed to Wani as his own authorship – a factual error the High Court explicitly noted in its ruling.
The judicial intervention in Wani’s case unfolds against a rapidly shifting political backdrop in Indian-administered Kashmir, dating back to the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government’s 2019 unilateral abrogation of Article 370 of the Indian constitution, the legal provision that previously granted the region semi-autonomous special status. In the years following that move, the region has undergone sweeping administrative overhauls, including the implementation of new domicile laws that widespread critics across the region and global human rights groups decry as a deliberate “settler-colonial project” engineered to dismantle the region’s longstanding Muslim demographic majority. For local residents, the post-2019 era has brought steadily eroded civil liberties, with routine criminalisation of even peaceful dissent: journalists, academics and independent activists face waves of arbitrary detentions, sweeping blanket book bans, widespread withholding of passports for ordinary citizens, and a pervasive architecture of continuous state surveillance that permeates nearly every sphere of public life. Most recently, the BJP-appointed leadership of the Jammu and Kashmir Waqf Board – the state body tasked with overseeing the region’s Islamic shrines and mosques – issued a controversial directive mandating identical, uniform Friday sermon scripts for every mosque across the territory, a move that sparked widespread public outcry from religious leaders and worshippers alike.
Wani’s successful court challenge arrives at a moment of deepening alarm among regional academics, legal practitioners and human rights organisations over the accelerating erosion of intellectual life across Kashmir, as state security frameworks increasingly frame critical thinking and independent scholarly inquiry as inherent national security threats. Dozens of members of the region’s small, tight-knit academic community warn that years of arbitrary detentions targeting writers and researchers have already created a pervasive chilling effect, reshaping what topics scholars dare to explore, what texts they choose to publish, and even what ideas they discuss in public spaces. A 40-something Kashmiri fiction writer based in Srinagar, who requested full anonymity to avoid state reprisals, explained the stifling atmosphere: “When books are banned en masse, and people are locked up just on the unproven assumption that they hold anti-national views, you can imagine the pressure on every writer. Many of us are struggling to produce work at all, some have stopped writing entirely, and the rest only produce content that we know will not upset the authorities. You will not find a single critical, unflinching story in local media anymore – only content that the state deems acceptable. There is no remaining space for independent critical thought.”
This crackdown on intellectual output has escalated sharply over the past 18 months. In 2024, regional authorities issued a formal blanket ban on the publication, sale and circulation of 25 prominent titles focused on Kashmir, alleging the works propagated “false narratives” and advocated for secession from India. The banned list included titles from globally celebrated scholars and award-winning journalists, including Arundhati Roy, A.G. Noorani, Victoria Schofield, Hafsa Kanjwal, Ather Zia and Anuradha Bhasin, with some of the suppressed volumes published by internationally respected academic presses including Cambridge University Press. The accompanying official directive ordered every school, college, university and public library in the region to conduct full audits of their collections to remove any material deemed to contain “objectionable content”.
The book screening drive intensified in July 2025, when authorities launched a territory-wide mass filtering of holdings across Kashmir’s most prominent libraries and higher education institutions, claiming stored texts included content that glorified leaders associated with the Kashmiri self-determination movement. All educational institutions received formal orders to conduct line-by-line vetting of every book, peer-reviewed journal, student dissertation, doctoral thesis and even digital educational resources on their servers, to “prevent any activity prejudicial to the sovereignty and security of the nation”. Current university students confirmed to independent outlet Middle East Eye that institutions now enforce strict mandates requiring all seminar topics to be pre-approved by administrations, all guest speakers to be vetted by state security officials, and syllabi to be systematically scrubbed of critical political science and literature content that addresses the region’s decades-long conflict or its unvarnished modern history.
In a September address to the local legislative assembly, Jammu and Kashmir’s education minister Sakina Itoo confirmed that authorities had already removed 4,249 books from public, school and college library shelves, and sent an additional 1,752 titles for formal “expert review” after completing initial screenings of more than 2.18 million total books across the region. Independent legislator Sheikh Khurshid, who first raised questions about the mass book removals in the assembly, told reporters in Srinagar that the untransparent removal of titles amounts to a deliberate effort to erase the region’s distinct collective history. “We have never been given a full, public list of exactly which books have been pulled from circulation, and that irony is impossible to miss,” Khurshid noted. “Banning books runs directly contrary to the government’s repeated public claims that full freedom of expression is enjoyed by every resident in Jammu and Kashmir.”
Leading global scholars of Kashmiri studies have framed the broader crackdown as a direct threat to the foundational values of open, democratic societies. Mohamad Junaid, an assistant professor of anthropology at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, emphasised that academic freedom is inextricably tied to freedom of conscience, the core pillar of all modern liberal, tolerant societies. “The absence of that freedom signals that a society has drifted sharply in the opposite, illiberal direction,” Junaid explained. “The right to pursue unfiltered academic inquiry benefits every member of society, even when the sitting government finds its conclusions inconvenient. Blocking critical academic work blinds an entire population to its own flaws and systemic injustices. In these recent high-profile cases, what is at stake is not just the right to conduct independent research – it is the fundamental question of whether Kashmiris are even permitted to produce their own knowledge about their communities and their lived realities.”
Ather Zia, an associate professor of anthropology and gender studies at the University of Northern Colorado whose own work appears on the 2024 banned book list, noted that nearly every dimension of daily life for Kashmiri residents has grown exponentially more restrictive in recent years. “When books are reclassified as contraband, especially for researchers whose entire work depends on broad, unimpeded access to diverse ideas and critical inquiry, that tells you far more about the nature of the state itself than it does about the content of the texts,” Zia argued.
Even the region’s elected chief minister Omar Abdullah has publicly acknowledged his own powerlessness to intervene in the book ban policies, noting that the elected local government’s formal governing powers have been drastically curtailed under current administrative rules. “I hold my own personal views on whether banning books is ever justified, but unfortunately under the current system, the elected local government has no authority to make decisions on these matters,” Abdullah told reporters in September, adding that his administration would “take a fresh look at what is happening” to pursue potential future reforms.
Goldie Osuri, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Warwick, argued that Wani’s detention case is irrefutable evidence that no meaningful academic freedom remains in Indian-administered Kashmir. “When mere possession of academic or literary material is cited as a legitimate justification for detention, it is undeniable that a state willing to use preventive detention to punish people on that basis is engaging in textbook fascism,” Osuri stated. “We already know 25 landmark books on Kashmir were banned on August 5, 2025. Even though the Jammu and Kashmir High Court ultimately quashed Wani’s detention, the fact that state authorities described his academic materials as holding ‘dispiriting titles’ reveals the deeply hostile attitude both the state and local legal system hold toward independent critical research. Laws like UAPA and PSA are not counter-terror tools – they are designed to intimidate academics, journalists and ordinary citizens into silence. Wani was held for more than a year under the PSA, a deliberate signal to every other resident that any independent research, journalism or creative writing that deviates from official state narratives will be met with severe punitive consequences. Preventive detention in Kashmir no longer bears any connection to conventional justice – it is a political weapon, deployed explicitly to silence even the faintest hint of criticism or dissent against the state. In Wani’s case, nothing more than the possession of academic reading material was treated as sufficient grounds to lock him away without trial.”