950806

India seizes US

author's book on Kashmir

NEW DELHI: The Indian government has impounded a book which is critical of its policy in troubled Kashmir in a move the U.S. author said appeared to be an attempt to muzzle public criticism.

Indian customs confiscated a box containing about 75 copies of the book, "Double Betrayal: Repression and Insurgency in Kashmir", when it arrived in New Delhi from the United States in the second half of July, Indian officials said.

Author Paula Newberg, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, said that despite repeated appeals by her and U.S. diplomats to high-ranking Indian officials, her work remained entangled in the bureaucracy.

"It has become very easy to take advantage of the Indian bureaucracy and confine the monograph to purgatory," Newberg told Reuters by telephone from Washington.

Peter Heinlein, who had planned to distribute the books to Indian government leaders, newspaper editors and human-rights groups in Delhi, said: "It is a huge bureaucratic tangle."

Home (Interior) Ministry spokesman K. Ramachandra Rao confirmed the books had been impounded.

"The copies were confiscated by customs and are still being processed. A decision has not been taken whether to release or not to release them," he said.

"It is at a crucial stage. The decision has to be taken by the top brass at the Home Ministry," Rao said.

Newberg said her 75-page book is critical of both India and Pakistan for what she called an absence of will to resolve their half-century-long dispute over the Himalayan region.-Reuter