 On 22nd August, a pre-publication launch event was organized to release the book, Delhi Riots 2020, The Untold Story. This book has been published by Roomsbury Publications India and has been authored by members of an organization called Group of Intellectuals and Academics, Monica Arora, Sonali Chitalkar and Kreen Namalutra. The book claims to be a fact-finding report on the violence that took place in the capital in February earlier this year and attributes this violence to what it calls a Naxal Jihadi network. At this launch event, the chief guests that were invited included Vivek Agnihotri, the filmmaker who is known for his vicious trolling and very outspoken support for the BJP on social media, BJP member of parliament and national general secretary, Gupendra Yadav, Nopur Sharma, who is the editor of the right-wing news website of India and Kapil Mishra, who is known for his inflammatory speeches days before violence broke loose in the capital. Soon after this event was publicized, social media exploded with criticism both against the publisher and the book. Today, we have with us Sudhanva Deshpande, who is the managing editor of an independent publishing house in Delhi, Leftward Books, who also wrote a seething criticism calling Bloomsbury out on their decision to publish this book, which according to him has blood on its hands. Welcome, Sudhanva. So could you tell us about what according to you is the problem with a book like Delhi riots 2020? This is a book that is based on the report, supposedly, allegedly fact-finding report that was put together by some members of the Hindu right and was submitted to the Home Ministry in June. Now, what this report does is actually it overturns the actual narrative of the riots that happened. It basically claims that the victims of riots were the perpetrators of the riot. And it built an entire conspiracy theory around this. Now, you see, this is not an ordinary analysis, analytical book of something that historically happened. This is trying to spin a narrative. And this narrative, why is this dangerous? It's a dangerous narrative because this is exactly the narrative that has been used by the Delhi police in order to arrest people who have been part of the anti-CAA and other protests against the government in recent times. So it's very clearly an attempt to muzzle dissent. And the moment this sort of book is published, it gives it a veneer of respectability. This kind of a conspiracy theory, which should be dismissed as merely a conspiracy theory, but it acquires a veneer of respectability because a mainstream publishing house is going to publish it. That's the problem. So when it faced all this criticism, Bloomsbury first distanced itself from the launch event, and then subsequently also from the publication itself, and it withdrew the publication, citing that it felt a sense of social responsibility. But soon after this, social media was abuzz with injunctions of free speech. And this is at a time when people like Dabholkar and Kalburki, Gauri Lankesh, have been murdered for their writings, but also their killers continue to roam free. So how do you feel about this debate? This is not a free speech issue at all. You see, it's a regular practice. For instance, if you take any of the major newspapers in the world, there is a practice of retracting a news article that you put out. If you make a mistake, you retract your article or you retract a certain piece that you put out. And that's a normal practice. It's a good practice. It is something that tells the world that you're serious about what you do, that you're also open to correcting your mistakes. Now, as far as I know, and I did follow this to a great extent, the outrage against the book was not about saying that ban this book or nobody was saying that if this book is published, they're going to come and attack you, either the authors or the publisher or any bookseller that could have sold this book. There was no threat issued. All that people were saying, including myself, is that we can't believe, it's unbelievable, that a publishing house like Gloomsbury, which is a major publishing house, it's internationally highly respected. A publishing house like this, is it willing to back a book of this kind? And why it becomes an even further issue is that you see, in any publishing house, you don't publish everything that comes your way. That's the reason why you're a publishing house. There's a way in which you sift through. The hundreds of proposals that you get for books, and then you say that you're going to publish this one and this one and this one, whatever is your editorial policy, the publishing policy, however you want to approach the market, etc., etc., different houses will do it differently. But in all publishing houses, there is an assumption that you would exercise editorial control over what you published. And one part of that, particularly if you want to be seen seriously in the publishing world, one part of it has to do with a rigorous review process. Now, what does a review process mean? It means three things. At least, it means firstly that you would review it internally within your organization, that there would be somebody within your organization who would read through the proposal or read through whatever is given to you and then say that, okay, maybe this is a book that we can consider publishing. At which point it would go out to external reviewers and you would choose people who are well known in the field, who are of high academic standing and so on, and one or two such reviewers would review the proposal for you if you're not sure yourself. And then when you start working on the book, the job of the editors is to vet every piece of information that is going to go out. That doesn't mean that editors get to veto what the authors want to say. But editor's job is to make sure that what the author is trying to say is said in the best possible manner and is said in a way in which it doesn't compromise the author's position as well, that there's no looseness in the argument, that careless assertions are not being made, that it's not opening up the author to let's say libel and so on and so forth. There's a whole range of things that we have to look at. Now, all of this takes time. Even just the review process at the first instance, which is a publishing house deciding that we are going to publish this book, even that process typically takes several weeks. In the case of major publishing houses, big publishing houses, it can take several months. Now here's a book which is based on a report and allegedly fact-finding report, which was submitted to the Home Ministry in June. And already before August is over, the book was already out in the sense that it was already published, it was printed. So it seems really amazing to me as to how a major publishing house could push through the publication of something as sensitive as a book on the daily riots 2020 without doing the most basic, elementary, fact-checking, wetting of material, review process, etc. That is absolutely normal and standard in any publishing house. The second point I want to make is that nobody is saying that the author doesn't have the right to write this book. When we say something that goes against the government, the moment we say, we are told that you have no right to say this. If you are saying this, you'd better go to Pakistan, you're anti-national, you're seditious, etc., etc. That is what is said to us if we speak up against the government. Now, nobody said that the author does not have the right to write this book. What we were questioning was, what I was questioning, certainly, was how could Bloom's Bay, which is a major, reputed, respectable publishing house, how could it have cleared the whole process of the publishing of this book without going through its own high standards? We assume that they follow high standards. Therefore, the question is not the question of freedom of expression. Every publishing house will decide what they want to publish, which necessarily means that they reject a lot of proposals that come their way. Why was this not rejected or why was this not even subjected to the normal review process? As it appears, it may not have been. I'm not an insider in Bloomsbury. I don't know what procedures were followed, but as a publishing professional, it seems to me that this time period that we are talking about is too little time to be able to do that. I'm very glad that they've withdrawn the book. I don't think it's a freedom of expression issue at all. The authors are free to go to some other publisher that could publish them. I've heard, I've seen on social media at least, that people are saying that the book is going to be published by some other publisher. Good for them. All good luck to them. But the prestige that they were looking for by publishing via a major publishing house is not going to come their way. Now, it also seems to me that the very people who attack you all the time, the very people who attack institutions of higher learning, whether it is JNU or Jamia Miliya Islamia or Aligarh Muslim University, FTII, etc., etc., Hyderabad Central, there's a whole list of institutions of higher learning that have come under attack from these very forces who are now tom-toming this whole issue as a freedom of expression issue. It's not. It's not. It's a question of giving legitimacy to a very pernicious argument, a very dangerous argument. And it's a dangerous argument not just in theory. It's a dangerous argument because it endangers, literally it endangers the lives of people. People who have been involved in the anti-CIA and other protests against the government are being rounded up today, whether they are students, intellectuals, activists, etc., are being rounded up today and are put behind bars and so on and so forth. There are cases being, you know, they've been charged with serious crimes. They've been charged under UAPA, etc., etc. Now, this is a real issue. It's not just about, you know, it's not just about pursuit of knowledge. There are lives at stake here, which is why my argument is that this book has blood on its hands. This book is part of an architecture of terror and it needs to be opposed for that reason. Finally, the question is, at a time when increasingly we see that media of all kinds, whether it is print or television, is being used to aggressively federal one narrative. What is the role that publishing houses should have? What is their responsibility? What are the protocols that they should follow? I would just say that, particularly at times when the atmosphere is charged one way or the other and especially if you feel like something that you do is not just going to impact the field of knowledge in an abstract sort of way but is going to endanger or is going to have an impact on actual lives of human beings, then you have a responsibility. You have to look at things very carefully, you know, you have to assess into, you have to ask yourself the question into what narrative are you, is there a narrative that you are helping to promote and is that narrative something that you're willing to stand by? Now, I'm not one to say to Bloomsbury that, you know, you should not publish right-wing stuff. They have been publishing right-wing authors. There are, you know, biographies of Baba Ramdev and I'm told there's a biography of Amit Shah, etc. and now after this controversy is broken out, there are authors, right-wing authors, whose books had been accepted by Bloomsbury for publication, who are now threatening Bloomsbury that we are not going to publish with you. So, actually, these are the guys who are holding out the credit, right? So, you know, that's what they believe in. That's what the right-wing stands for. This whole atmosphere of creating fear, intimidation, threats and not be open to a rational, logical, reasonable argument based on facts, based on some examination of what might be the truth behind things and so on. They're not interested in that. They don't want that. Now, in this sort of a situation, it becomes incumbent upon any publishing house that sees itself as a serious publishing house that wants to be taken seriously and I'm not pointing fingers at Bloomsbury in particular, you know, I mean, every publishing house will have their own editorial policy. That's fine. You can choose to publish left-wing, right-wing, sentries, whatever it is that you want to publish. But I think it's important that you follow some degree of rigor in your editorial practices. Thank you for that, Sudhanya. The book has now been withdrawn and it does seem like a victory for progressive secular thought, but we must continue to challenge what Sudhanya calls the architecture of terror.