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SRINAGAR, India: Indian authorities have banned 25 books in Kashmir that they say propagate “false narratives” and “secessionism” in the disputed region, where strict controls on the media have escalated in recent years.

The ban threatens people with prison time for selling or owning these works by authors such as Booker Prize-winning novelist and activist Arundhati Roy, constitutional expert A.G. Noorani, and noted academicians and historians like Sumantra Bose, Christopher Snedden and Victoria Schofield.

The order was issued on Tuesday by the region’s Home Department, which is under the direct control of Lt. Gov. Manoj Sinha, New Delhi’s top administrator in Kashmir.

Sinha wields substantial power in the region as the national government’s representative, while elected officials run a largely powerless government that took office last year after the first local election since India stripped the disputed region of its special status in 2019.

The order declared the 25 books “forfeit” under India’s new criminal code of 2023, effectively banning the works from circulation, possession and access within the Himalayan region.

 Various elements of the code threaten prison terms of three years, seven years or even life for offenses related to forfeit media, although no one has been jailed yet under them.

“The identified 25 books have been found to excite secessionism and endangering sovereignty and integrity of India,” the Home Department said in its notice. Such books played “a critical role in misguiding the youth, glorifying terrorism and inciting violence against Indian State,” it said.

The action was taken following “investigations and credible intelligence” about “systemic dissemination of false narratives and secessionist literature” that was “often disguised as historical or political commentary,” it said.

In compliance with the order, police officials on Thursday raided bookstores, searched roadside book vendors and other establishments dealing in printed publications in the main city of Srinagar and across multiple locations in the region to confiscate the banned literature, police said. However, officials didn’t specify if they had seized any such material.

Bose, a political scientist and author whose book “Kashmir at Cross Roads” was among the banned works, rejected “any and all defamatory slurs” on his work, the Press Trust of India news agency reported.

“I have worked on Kashmir — among many other subjects — since 1993,” Bose said.

 “Throughout, my chief objective has been to identify pathways to peace so that all violence ends and a stable future free of fear and war can be enjoyed by the people of the conflict region, of India as a whole, and the subcontinent.

“I am a committed and principled advocate of peaceful approaches and resolutions to armed conflicts, be it in Kashmir or elsewhere in the world,” he said.

Nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan each administer part of Kashmir, but both claim the territory in its entirety.

Militants in the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir have been fighting New Delhi’s rule since 1989. Many Muslim Kashmiris support the rebels’ goal of uniting the territory, either under Pakistani rule or as an independent country.

India insists the Kashmir militancy is Pakistan-sponsored “terrorism.” Pakistan denies the charge, and many Kashmiris consider it a legitimate freedom struggle. Tens of thousands of civilians, rebels and government forces have been killed in the conflict.

Since 2019, authorities have increasingly criminalized dissent and shown no tolerance for any narrative that questions India’s sovereignty over Kashmir.

In February, police raided bookstores and seized hundreds of books linked to a major Islamic organization in the region.

In 2011, police filed charges against Kashmir education officials over a textbook for first graders that illustrated the word “tyrant” with a sketch resembling a police official.

A year earlier, police arrested a college lecturer on charges that he gave his students an English exam filled with questions attacking a crackdown on demonstrations challenging Indian rule in the region.

In some cases, the accused were freed after police questioning, but most of these cases have lingered on in India’s notoriously slow judicial system.

Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, a key resistance leader in Kashmir, condemned the book ban.

“Banning books by scholars and reputed historians will not erase historical facts and the repertoire of lived memories of people of Kashmir,” Mirwaiz said in a statement.

He questioned authorities for organizing an ongoing book festival to showcase its literary commitment but then going on to ban some books.

“It only exposes the insecurities and limited understanding of those behind such authoritarian actions, and the contradiction in proudly hosting the ongoing Book Festival,” he said.

Banning books isn’t common in India, but authorities under Prime Minister Narendra Modi have increasingly raided independent media houses, jailed journalists and sought to rewrite history in school and university textbooks to promote the Hindu nationalist vision of his governing Bharatiya Janata Party.

Meanwhile, curriculums related to Muslim Mughal rulers who ruled much of India between the 16th and 19th centuries have been altered or removed. Last year, an Indian court ended a decades-long ban on Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses”, owing to the absence of any official order that had banned the book in 1988.

CAMBRIDGE: Harvard University professor Alberto Ascherio’s research is literally frozen.
Collected from millions of US soldiers over two decades using millions of dollars from taxpayers, the epidemiology and nutrition scientist has blood samples stored in liquid nitrogen freezers within the university’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

The samples are key to his award-winning research, which seeks a cure to multiple sclerosis and other neurodegenerative diseases. But for months, Ascherio has been unable to work with the samples because he lost $7 million in federal research funding, a casualty of Harvard’s fight with the Trump administration.

“It’s like we have been creating a state-of-the-art telescope to explore the universe, and now we don’t have money to launch it,” said Ascherio. “We built everything and now we are ready to use it to make a new discovery that could impact millions of people in the world and then, ‘Poof. You’re being cut off.’”

Researchers laid off and science shelved

The loss of an estimated $2.6 billion in federal funding at Harvard has meant that some of the world’s most prominent researchers are laying off young researchers. They are shelving years or even decades of research, into everything from opioid addiction to cancer.

And despite Harvard’s lawsuits against the administration, and settlement talks between the warring parties, researchers are confronting the fact that some of their work may never resume.

The funding cuts are part of a monthslong battle that the Trump administration has waged against some the country’s top universities including Columbia, Brown and Northwestern. The administration has taken a particularly aggressive stance against Harvard, freezing funding after the country’s oldest university rejected a series of government demands issued by a federal antisemitism task force.

The government had demanded sweeping changes at Harvard related to campus protests, academics and admissions — meant to address government accusations that the university had become a hotbed of liberalism and tolerated anti-Jewish harassment.

Research jeopardized, even if court case prevails

Harvard responded by filing a federal lawsuit, accusing the Trump administration of waging a retaliation campaign against the university. In the lawsuit, it laid out reforms it had taken to address antisemitism but also vowed not to “surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.”

“Make no mistake: Harvard rejects antisemitism and discrimination in all of its forms and is actively making structural reforms to eradicate antisemitism on campus,” the university said in its legal complaint. “But rather than engage with Harvard regarding those ongoing efforts, the Government announced a sweeping freeze of funding for medical, scientific, technological, and other research that has nothing at all to do with antisemitism.”

The Trump administration denies the cuts were made in retaliation, saying the grants were under review even before the demands were sent in April. It argues the government has wide discretion to cancel federal contracts for policy reasons.

The funding cuts have left Harvard’s research community in a state of shock, feeling as if they are being unfairly targeted in a fight has nothing to do with them. Some have been forced to shutter labs or scramble to find nongovernment funding to replace lost money.

In May, Harvard announced that it would put up at least $250 million of its own money to continue research efforts, but university President Alan Garber warned of “difficult decisions and sacrifices” ahead.

Ascherio said the university was able to pull together funding to pay his researchers’ salaries until next June. But he’s still been left without resources needed to fund critical research tasks, like lab work. Even a year’s delay can put his research back five years, he said.

Knowledge lost in funding freeze

“It’s really devastating,” agreed Rita Hamad, the director of the Social Policies for Health Equity Research Center at Harvard, who had three multiyear grants totaling $10 million canceled by the Trump administration. The grants funded research into the impact of school segregation on heart health, how pandemic-era policies in over 250 counties affected mental health, and the role of neighborhood factors in dementia.

At the School of Public Health, where Hamad is based, 190 grants have been terminated, affecting roughly 130 scientists.

“Just thinking about all the knowledge that’s not going to be gained or that is going to be actively lost,” Hamad said. She expects significant layoffs on her team if the funding freeze continues for a few more months. “It’s all just a mixture of frustration and anger and sadness all the time, every day.”

John Quackenbush, a professor of computational biology and bioinformatics at the School of Public Health, has spent the past few months enduring cuts on multiple fronts.

In April, a multimillion dollar grant was not renewed, jeopardizing a study into the role sex plays in disease. In May, he lost about $1.2 million in federal funding for in the coming year due to the Harvard freeze. Four departmental grants worth $24 million that funded training of doctoral students also were canceled as part of the fight with the Trump administration, Quackenbush said.

“I’m in a position where I have to really think about, ‘Can I revive this research?’” he said. “Can I restart these programs even if Harvard and the Trump administration reached some kind of settlement? If they do reach a settlement, how quickly can the funding be turned back on? Can it be turned back on?”

The researchers all agreed that the funding cuts have little or nothing to do with the university’s fight against antisemitism. Some, however, argue changes at Harvard were long overdue and pressure from the Trump administration was necessary.

Bertha Madras, a Harvard psychobiologist who lost funding to create a free, parent-focused training to prevent teen opioid overdose and drug use, said she’s happy to see the culling of what she called “politically motivated social science studies.”

White House pressure a good thing?

Madras said pressure from the White House has catalyzed much-needed reform at the university, where several programs of study have “really gone off the wall in terms of being shaped by orthodoxy that is not representative of the country as a whole.”

But Madras, who served on the President’s Commission on Opioids during Trump’s first term, said holding scientists’ research funding hostage as a bargaining chip doesn’t make sense.

“I don’t know if reform would have happened without the president of the United States pointing the bony finger at Harvard,” she said. “But sacrificing science is problematic, and it’s very worrisome because it is one of the major pillars of strength of the country.”

Quackenbush and other Harvard researchers argue the cuts are part of a larger attack on science by the Trump administration that puts the country’s reputation as the global research leader at risk. Support for students and post-doctoral fellows has been slashed, visas for foreign scholars threatened, and new guidelines and funding cuts at the NIH will make it much more difficult to get federal funding in the future, they said. It also will be difficult to replace federal funding with money from the private sector.

“We’re all sort of moving toward this future in which this 80-year partnership between the government and the universities is going to be jeopardized,” Quackenbush said. “We’re going to face real challenges in continuing to lead the world in scientific excellence.”