Editorial: When publishers chicken out

CHENNAI: Sonia Gandhi’s memoir Belonging: A Journey of Love has run into controversy even before its release. The book is being published internationally by Alfred A Knopf and is scheduled for release abroad on Nov. 10, but for the India publication, the author’s negotiations with Penguin Random House India (PRHI) have run aground.

While some Congress leaders have said PRHI wanted Sonia Gandhi to delete critical material on Narendra Modi and his handling of China’s encroachments into Indian territory, the publisher would not go into the specifics of why the talks fell through. Instead, it released a statement distancing itself from the book but asserting “both our prerogative and our responsibility to fact-check and provide authors with recommendations that are in the best interests of their books.”

Of course, it is a publisher’s prerogative how they choose to expend their paper, but, remarkably, supine publishers always spout high-sounding editorial principles. Surely, PRHI's touching concern for Sonia Gandhi's “best interests” is tempered by their need to kowtow to the government, even if unbidden? India has an entire library of books that have run into trouble at various stages of their life under pressure, overt or perceived, from the Hindutva right wing and the Narendra Modi government. It’s a library to which PRHI and its predecessor Penguin India have contributed a few entries.

In fact, the kowtowing began even before Narendra Modi came to power in May 2014. In February that year, the publisher caved in to litigation launched by the late Dinanath Batra of the RSS-affiliated Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti and decided to pulp copies of Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History, which examined India’s past from a non-Brahmanical and non-patriarchal point of view. Several other authors protested the decision and asked for their books to be pulped too.

Penguin India’s surrender set the tone for other publishers in subsequent months and years and served to lodge self-censorship as the preferred tool of thought control in the Narendra Modi years. Doniger’s other books on Hinduism were reviewed to discourage any critique of Manusmriti from a female or subaltern perspective. Orient BlackSwan subjected its entire catalogue to a review under Dinanath Batra’s assault and even the public sector National Book Trust aborted a massive reprint of historian Bipan Chandra’s Communalism: A Primer because it did not show the RSS in the desired new light.

More recently, PRHI played a role in the controversy over the memoirs of former Army chief Gen MM Naravane. It asserted its copyright over the unpublished book but imparted no clarity when some of its purported contents were printed in a magazine and figured in Rahul Gandhi’s speech in Parliament. Earlier this year, PRHI decided not to distribute the graphic book The Once and Future Riot on the 2013 riots in Muzaffarnagar. The author Joe Sacco claimed he was asked to change some of the contents, which he refused. But the publisher said its decision was based on a disputed map in the book. Last year, in January 2025, a biography of MS Golwalkar by Dhirendra K Jha fell through for similar reasons and at the same stage.

Penguin India has every right to take decisions in the interests of its business, but its fidelity to freedom of expression becomes suspect when it hides behind opaque corporate speak.