Nawanshahr- Adara Parvaaz Punjab has strongly opposed the Jammu and Kashmir government's ban on 25 books by eminent writers. Issuing a statement to the press today, the state leaders of the organization Sukhwinder Pappi, Dr. Arvinder Kaur Kakra, Ajmer Sidhu, Jasbir Deep, Iqbal Kaur Udasi said that banning 25 books that talk about the rights and discrimination of the people of Jammu and Kashmir is to suppress the voice of writers and artists.
These books are written by eminent writers, scholars, editors and historians like Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy, Tariq Ali, Abdul Ghafoor Majeed Noorani, Anuradha Bhasin, Sumantra Bose, Christopher Sneddon, Radhika Gupta, Seema Qazi, Dr. Abdul Jabbar Gokhani.
The banning of these books, which are based on in-depth research and historical facts and published by internationally renowned publishing groups like Oxford University Press, Routledge, Viking Penguin, Harper Collins, Cambridge University Press, Penn Macmillan India, as “false narratives” and “misleading” literature promoting “separatism”, is a clear indication of the government’s fascist mentality.
Which is an integral part of the policy of crushing the democratic right of the oppressed Kashmiri people to self-determination by force of military force. This is a despicable attempt to erase the documentary evidence of the oppression and discrimination faced by the Kashmiris and to snatch their history from the future generations of the Kashmiri nation, through which the government wants to establish its favorite false narrative as eternal truth.
World history is a witness that the desire for self-determination of any community can be temporarily suppressed by military intimidation and coercion, but it cannot be eradicated. The seven and a half decades of struggle of the Kashmiri people themselves confirms this historical truth.
All justice-loving and democratic values-loving forces should strongly oppose this fascist decree. The leaders of the front have demanded that the Jammu and Kashmir administration withdraw this ban, stop attacks on the right to expression of opinion and restore the special status of Jammu and Kashmir while recognizing the right of the Kashmiri people to self-determination.