The phrase “Once a dhimmi, always a dhimmi” is deliberately unsettling. In the controversy surrounding two books supplied to government-school libraries in Jammu and Kashmir, it functions not as a literal legal proposition but as a metaphor for a more difficult question: can habits of political deference, historical self-erasure and unequal moral judgment survive long after the institutions that produced them have disappeared?
An academic examination requires care at the outset. The historical term dhimmi has a specific place in Islamic jurisprudence, whereas the modern expression “dhimmitude” is frequently used in political argument. Neither term should become a label for Muslims as a community, a substitute for evidence or a device for assigning inherited guilt. The useful task is to examine institutions, texts and decisions while distinguishing religious identity from separatism, terrorism and failures of public administration.
What happened in Jammu and Kashmir
On 3 July 2026, the Jammu and Kashmir School Education Department ordered the withdrawal of two books after determining that they contained what it called “highly inappropriate content” related to separatism. The controversy became widely public on 4 July, when disciplinary action was announced. The two titles were Personalities and Legends of J&K, written by Hilal Ahmed and Santosh Meena, and Great Personalities of Jammu and Kashmir, written by Dr Sushant Giri.
The first title was supplied by Oberoi Book Service, Jammu, and the second by Anurag Prakashan, Delhi. According to the departmental account reported by The Indian Express, 123 copies of the first book reached libraries in Jammu, Ramban and Udhampur districts, while 128 copies of the second reached Jammu and Baramulla districts. These were supplementary library books for higher-secondary students, not formally prescribed textbooks, but that distinction does not eliminate the state’s responsibility for their selection.
The books entered schools through the Samagra Shiksha programme. Four expert subcommittees had reportedly been constituted to evaluate age-appropriate material for different educational levels, and hundreds of titles submitted by numerous publishers were considered. The disputed books were associated with the committee responsible for higher-secondary material. The scale of that process makes the episode more significant than an isolated librarian’s mistake: it reveals a failure somewhere in selection, supervision, documentation or all three.
Reports stated that passages described Maqbool Bhatt as a “martyr” and presented separatist figures as “great personalities” or “legends.” Other reported excerpts used expressions such as “Indian Held Kashmir” and “Indian Occupied Kashmir.” Because the complete books and their precise editorial framing are essential to a definitive textual assessment, each disputed passage should be evaluated in context. Nevertheless, honorific language in a state-funded school library cannot be dismissed as semantically trivial.
A biography may document a separatist, militant or convicted offender because such figures can be historically consequential. Documentation, however, differs from veneration. Terms such as “martyr,” “legend,” “hero” and “great personality” do more than identify a person; they confer moral status. If a book uses those words in its own editorial voice rather than within an attributed quotation, it risks teaching admiration where critical examination is required.
The distinction is especially important for adolescents. A mature researcher may recognize that a chapter title, quotation or ideological slogan requires contextual scrutiny. A school student may reasonably assume that a government-provided volume has already passed tests of accuracy, balance and educational suitability. The official stamp of selection therefore becomes part of the message.
The administrative response
The government suspended eight School Education Department officials, disengaged a contractual employee, ordered an inquiry and blacklisted the authors and publishers identified in the procurement record. The order characterized the episode as serious negligence, dereliction of duty and lack of due diligence. An inquiry officer was reportedly directed to submit findings within 30 days.
The Counter-Intelligence wing of the Jammu and Kashmir Police subsequently registered a case under provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita concerning abetment, conspiracy, sovereignty, communal disharmony and false or inflammatory statements, along with Section 13 of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. Searches and later arrests were also reported. These are serious procedural developments, but allegations, suspensions and arrests are not findings of guilt. Criminal liability must be established through evidence and due process.
Subsequent reporting added an important institutional detail. Personalities and Legends of J&K was first published in 2017, and an edition had reportedly been acquired by Jammu University in 2022 before the school-library controversy. That history demonstrates why the inquiry should examine the entire chain of production and circulation: original rights, later editions, catalogues, publisher submissions, committee notes, procurement approvals and final distribution records.
What “dhimmi” historically meant
The Arabic term dhimmi broadly denoted a protected non-Muslim permanent resident under a premodern Islamic polity. The status developed through the concept of dhimma, or a covenant of protection. In classical legal formulations, eligible non-Muslim communities could retain their faith and communal institutions while accepting Muslim political authority and paying jizya, a poll tax from which specified groups could be exempt.
The arrangement combined protection with hierarchy. It could provide personal security, property rights, worship and limited communal autonomy in societies where equal citizenship in the modern constitutional sense did not exist. At the same time, it formally distinguished Muslims from protected non-Muslims and, depending on the jurisdiction and period, could involve fiscal, civic, occupational or religious restrictions. An Oxford Academic overview describes the category as a contract of protection linked to permanent residence, preservation of faith and payment of jizya.
Historical practice was never uniform. Rules differed across legal schools, dynasties, provinces and centuries, while enforcement ranged from relatively pragmatic accommodation to severe discrimination. Hindus and other Indian communities were also treated differently across regimes despite not fitting neatly into the earliest juristic classification of scriptural communities. Any serious discussion must therefore avoid presenting a millennium of Islamic governance as a single, unchanging administrative system.
By contemporary standards, protected inequality remains inequality. Modern citizenship does not make a person’s civil standing conditional on accepting the supremacy of another religious community. The Constitution of India instead places equality before law, non-discrimination and freedom of conscience at the centre of the republic’s public order.
The metaphor—and its limits
The title’s use of dhimmi is metaphorical. It suggests that formal subordination can outlive its legal machinery by becoming a learned disposition: dominant narratives are repeated, aggression is romanticized, civilizational injuries are minimized and the majority becomes hesitant to describe its own historical experience. This interpretation may illuminate certain institutional habits, but it remains a hypothesis requiring evidence rather than a universal psychological law.
The word “always” is therefore rhetorically powerful but analytically dangerous. No community is permanently trapped in a subordinate mentality, and no person inherits an immutable civic character from ancestral experience. Institutions can be reformed, historical knowledge can be recovered and citizens can learn to evaluate competing narratives without hatred. Determinism would reproduce the very denial of agency that the metaphor seeks to criticize.
A single procurement scandal also cannot prove the existence of a civilizational mindset throughout an entire bureaucracy. What it can establish is narrower and more concrete: books carrying reportedly celebratory descriptions of separatist figures passed through a public selection mechanism and reached school libraries. That fact is sufficient to justify a rigorous inquiry without making unsupported claims about every official, teacher or community in Jammu and Kashmir.
Why historical language matters
Historical vocabulary is never completely neutral. “Insurgent,” “terrorist,” “revolutionary,” “separatist,” “martyr” and “freedom fighter” encode different judgments about legitimacy, violence and political authority. Responsible educational material identifies who is applying a label, explains the evidence behind it and distinguishes a source’s terminology from the book’s editorial position.
A technically sound entry on Maqbool Bhatt, for example, would distinguish verifiable biography, organizational affiliation, criminal proceedings, political objectives and later symbolic appropriation. It would explain that supporters and opponents describe him differently, while avoiding the adoption of partisan honorifics as settled fact. The same method should apply to every controversial figure, regardless of ideology.
Balanced history does not require silence about separatism or terrorism. Nor does it require suppressing evidence of political grievances, state errors or contested constitutional developments. It requires proportionality, sourcing and moral clarity: violence against civilians cannot be romanticized, an ideological claim cannot be presented as an undisputed geographical fact, and a political movement cannot be understood without its victims.
Kashmir’s modern history must consequently include the emergence of separatist organizations, cross-border sponsorship of militancy, terrorist violence, the displacement and killings of Kashmiri Hindus, the experiences of other affected communities, security operations, democratic politics and debates over governance. Removing any major strand produces not education but narrative management.
The region’s history is also far older and richer than the conflict of recent decades. A balanced library should introduce students to Kashmir’s Buddhist learning, Sanskrit scholarship, Shaiva philosophy, the Rajatarangini tradition, Rishi and Sufi currents, Sikh history, Dogra statecraft, regional languages, art and literature. Such breadth prevents violence from becoming the sole organizing principle of Kashmiri identity.
A Dharmic approach without collective blame
Dharmic solidarity does not require the erasure of differences among Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism. These traditions possess distinct philosophies, institutions and historical experiences. Their unity lies in a civilizational commitment to intellectual debate, multiple paths of practice, moral responsibility and resistance to coercive uniformity.
That commitment is strengthened when historical persecution is documented honestly. It is weakened when criticism of an ideology becomes hostility toward ordinary Muslims or when present citizens are treated as personally responsible for medieval empires and modern terrorist organizations. Academic integrity requires the separation of doctrines, institutions, movements, offenders and populations.
The appropriate response to separatist propaganda is therefore not communal suspicion. It is better scholarship, constitutional confidence and equal standards. A Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, Muslim, Christian or non-religious student should encounter the same rule: claims require evidence, violence requires moral scrutiny and no community receives an exemption from historical accountability.
Where the selection system failed
The official Samagra Shiksha library guidance treats libraries as instruments of intellectual, emotional and social development. It calls for age-appropriate material, sensitivity to religious and linguistic diversity, functional monitoring and committee-based selection. The current implementation framework further emphasizes a rigorous process capable of producing relevant, diverse and engaging collections.
The Jammu and Kashmir episode indicates that forming a committee is not the same as establishing a control system. A committee can fail through excessive workload, unclear standards, incomplete reading, publisher influence, weak recordkeeping, diffusion of responsibility or superficial approval based on catalogues and summaries. Effective governance must make each decision traceable.
Control 1: complete bibliographic provenance. Every submitted edition should have a recorded ISBN, publication year, rights holder, printer, publisher, edition history and digital checksum. This would prevent later confusion about which version was reviewed and whether the supplied copies matched the approved text.
Control 2: full-text review. Titles, tables of contents and publisher descriptions are insufficient for sensitive biographies or political histories. Reviewers should examine the entire text and record page-specific comments. Optical character recognition can assist keyword screening, but automated detection cannot replace human interpretation of quotation, context and tone.
Control 3: an explicit risk taxonomy. Review forms should separately evaluate factual accuracy, age suitability, hate content, glorification of violence, separatist advocacy, communal stereotyping, sexual material, plagiarism, fabricated citations and constitutional incompatibility. A single general approval box conceals too much information.
Control 4: source verification. Historical claims should be checked against primary records and reputable scholarship. Loaded descriptions must be attributed. Photographs, quotations and statistics require identifiable sources. A bibliography is not sufficient if the citations do not support the surrounding claims.
Control 5: multidisciplinary review. A politically sensitive regional history should not be assessed only by general educators. The panel should include subject historians, pedagogical specialists, language experts and professionals familiar with constitutional and security implications. Regional, gender and community diversity can reduce blind spots, provided members disclose conflicts of interest.
Control 6: independent escalation. Material containing references to terrorism, secession, communal violence or disputed sovereignty should receive a second review. Escalation should not mean automatic rejection; it should mean closer examination, documented reasoning and senior accountability.
Control 7: post-procurement auditing. A statistically meaningful sample of delivered books should be compared with approved editions. Teachers, librarians, parents and students need a clear channel for reporting errors. Complaints should trigger a time-bound review rather than an improvised political response.
Control 8: transparent correction. When a book is withdrawn, the department should publish the title, edition, disputed pages, applicable standard and reasoned decision, subject to lawful redactions. Transparency allows the public to distinguish a genuine content problem from censorship motivated by partisan pressure.
How contested books should be handled
Not every flawed or ideologically charged book must disappear from every research collection. A university library serves a different purpose from a school library. Scholars may need access to propaganda, extremist literature or historically important polemics precisely in order to study them. Age, institutional purpose, access conditions and critical apparatus should determine treatment.
For school use, three outcomes are possible. A book may be approved when it is accurate and suitable; approved with contextual material when it is valuable but contested; or rejected when its deficiencies overwhelm its educational utility. This graduated model is more intellectually defensible than treating every dispute as a choice between unrestricted circulation and universal prohibition.
Publishers and officials must also receive procedural fairness. A departmental inquiry should determine who read the books, what recommendations were made, whether the supplied editions were altered and whether negligence, deception or deliberate misconduct occurred. Collective blacklisting of unrelated works should be supported by individualized reasons and remain open to review.
The deeper lesson
A parent who sees a government-library label on a book naturally assumes that somebody has checked it. A teacher asked to cultivate critical thinking reasonably expects the selection system not to place unmarked advocacy beside reliable history. When that trust fails, the damage extends beyond one title: students begin to doubt public institutions, while political groups gain an opportunity to replace inquiry with accusation.
The remedy is not a fearful library emptied of difficult subjects. It is a confident library capable of distinguishing evidence from propaganda, biography from hagiography and explanation from endorsement. Students should be taught how narratives are constructed, how sources conflict and how emotionally charged labels influence judgment.
The “dhimmi” metaphor is most useful when it provokes institutional self-examination rather than hostility. Historical subordination should neither be denied nor converted into permanent victimhood. A society escapes inherited patterns by recovering memory, insisting on equal citizenship and building procedures strong enough to resist both intimidation and ideological fashion.
The Jammu and Kashmir book controversy ultimately concerns more than two publications. It concerns the moral authority conferred by public education, the precision required when describing political violence and the responsibility to preserve India’s civilizational memory without sacrificing academic standards. Honest history must neither glorify separatism nor conceal complexity. It must give young readers the evidence, context and confidence needed to judge responsibly.
Source note: This analysis expands upon “Once a dhimmi, always a dhimmi,” published by The Dossier on 6 July 2026, while incorporating publicly reported administrative details and historical context.
Inspired by this post on Hindu Post.
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