When Memory Awaits Permission: Why Unpublished Books and Leaked Excerpts Still Belong in the Public Domain
A democracy begins to collapse quietly when memory is treated as contraband and testimony is made conditional on permission. The most telling sites of this erosion is the uneasy space occupied by books that are written, circulated and discussed but not allowed to formally exist.
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| Home Minister Amit Shah visiting World Book Fair in New Delhi; Via HM |
A manuscript does not become real because a seal is affixed to it. It becomes real because it is written, because someone who witnessed events chose to place memory into language. Clearance can regulate circulation but it cannot annul authorship.
Excerpts from such works enter the public domain as acts of survival. They surface because there is no other available route for record to breathe. When formal publication is indefinitely delayed, when official or unofficial review becomes a holding pattern rather than a process, fragments step in to do the work that full texts are not allowed to do.
They prevent public memory from suffocating.
Let us not forget that many of the world’s most consequential political ideas first appeared as samizdat, leaked chapters, private letters, or partial reproductions. History has rarely waited for permission. It has relied instead on circulations that, at first instance, always seem messy, contested.
They have sometimes seen uncomfortable circulation to prevent official silence from hardening into accepted truth. The idea that legitimacy flows only from approval misunderstands how public knowledge is formed. Legitimacy flows from relevance, verifiability and consequence.
An excerpt is not a rumour. It is not an invention. It is a piece of a larger testimony, detached by obstruction. To dismiss it merely because the whole is unavailable is to punish the reader for a bottleneck they did not create. Worse, it allows power to weaponise incompleteness to first delay publication and then discredit any reference to the delayed work as “unauthorised.”
This circular logic has a chilling effect far beyond any single text. It signals to writers that memory is provisional. That experience is valid only after vetting. That reflection, especially when it brushes against institutions, is not a right but a request.
Over time, this produces not better writing, but safer writing. Accounts that are blunted before they are read. Histories that arrive already pre-compromised.
What is at stake here is public accountability. Many books placed under prolonged scrutiny are written by individuals who once occupied positions of responsibility. Their testimonies are records shaped by proximity to decision-making. To deny the public access to even partial insight from such records is to insist that power be remembered only through officially curated summaries.
There is also an ethical asymmetry at play here. The state often reserves for itself the right to selectively quote, contextualise, or invoke unpublished material when it serves institutional interest through affidavits, closed briefings, or background briefings that never reach public scrutiny.
But when citizens, journalists, or legislators engage with the same material in good faith, the act is reframed as reckless or destabilising. Transparency, in this formulation, is permitted only in one direction.
The insistence that “the full book is not out yet” also misunderstands how reading works. Readers are not passive vessels waiting for perfect information. They are capable of holding uncertainty. They understand that excerpts are partial, that context matters, that no single paragraph carries the weight of a life or a policy. What they ask for is access, the ability to judge, to question and to compare.
Suppressing excerpts does not preserve stability. It produces speculation. It replaces verifiable fragments with whispered versions, screenshots and half-remembered lines. Silence corrodes them by making them appear afraid of their own reflection. When the only answer to uncomfortable memory is delay, delay itself becomes a political statement.
There is a deeper cultural cost as well. Societies that normalise indefinite scrutiny of memory begin to internalise caution as virtue. Writers self-censor. Editors hesitate. Readers lower expectations. Over time, the public sphere shrinks because we are, collectively as a society, trained to expect less. What emerges is managed amnesia.
To argue for the legitimacy of excerpts is not to argue against responsibility. Accuracy matters. Attribution matters. Context matters. But responsibility cannot be defined as obedience to silence. The responsible act, when formal channels stall, is often to ensure that records do not disappear into drawers and committees without end.
A confident democracy should understand that truth is rarely delivered in pristine packages. It arrives in drafts, in margins, in pieces that provoke before they reassure. To insist that only fully sanctioned narratives deserve attention is to confuse authority with truth.
If memory must wait for clearance, then power alone decides what survives. But if fragments are allowed to circulate, examined, contested and argued over, then the public remains a participant in history. That difference is the line between a republic that remembers and one that slowly forgets itself.