After all, here is a master of the form, with award-winning work that had delivered difficult conflict zones – Paying the Land, Palestine, Safe Area Gorazde – thoughtfully, and with candour to his readers. Meticulous reporting, detailing and brilliant sketching made each book a work of art, a treat and a source of learning. Things he captured and wrote about enabled an understanding beyond borders. They invoked empathy for those affected by war, displacement and division. If Joe Sacco had bothered to travel to Muzaffarnagar, a year after the riots and violence there that shook India’s largest state, surely, we would want to see his work? Hum dekhenge?Bookstores in Delhi took bookings and Penguin Random House India assured the sellers that the book would arrive “by October” last year. Cut to June 2026, we hear from a spokesperson of Penguin Random House India that there is an ‘objectionable map’ in it. Earlier governments, while prickly about maps showing Kashmir off, would stamp on it, stick black labels or just blot them out. For this publisher, the 2×2 map was good enough reason to throw the book out – with the lone source of objection, its depiction of the LoC boundary outline.‘The Once and Future Riot’, Joe Sacco.Perfectly strange until Joe Sacco revealed in his conversation with The Wire’s Sidharth Bhatia that it wasn’t just one map but five pages of things that the publishers wanted changed. Sacco said he “got fed up” and refused to make any changes.Not having an Indian edition hobbles a book’s reach. An expensive foreign edition (a UK edition costs 20 pounds) immediately limits its readership, although some copies are available as a few bookstores in metro cities have brought in copies. But the question is why exactly would a book like this bother the government of India? And why would Penguin Random House India want to second-guess this botheration and drop such a star author? The world’s most vibrant democracy should revel in people bringing the scalpel and sketch pen to shine the light on the India story and write about its many parts. But as many scholars like Francesca Orsini, Nitasha Kaul and Fillip Osella discovered when they were turned back from airports after rounds of hostile questioning despite valid visas, there is a particularly hostile view of scholarship on India which does not match the BJP government’s view, especially if the scholar is not Indian.Audacious enough to research India, without just mouthing what PIB tells you? Tough luck.The government of India’s quest at rewriting history does not stop at turning textbooks into pamphlets of dark misinformation, but at pushing back at any work that counters Hindutva’s false histories. And most good work does. The first objection to Sacco’s work must therefore be exactly that which other scholars face at immigration counters and via hateful online trolling. Sacco must be discouraged about bringing attention on a story about a riot, the sentiments around which the BJP would want locally to fester, but will do everything to avoid it being spoken of, globally. ‘Act Local and Shut Up Global.’Sacco does much more than just stitch a ‘narrative’. His work has not crash-landed in backyards of residents of Muzaffarnagar, often in ways that work of some other big city reporters does. Sacco landed slowly and smoothly, and made an effort to look for and “catch the riot”, a year on. He caught its lasting imprint and has connected its politics through obvious tells like people then still living in relief camps and through their stories and testimonials. Sacco’s bullshit-radar is sharp and he makes no effort to mask his disbelief of some Muslim victim accounts and those from the Jat side – the two communities that stood in opposition in 2013 despite years and decades of co-existence and understanding. Sacco’s ability to render a forensic account, clearly laid out for even those not steeped deep in the India context, would present a threat to a government wanting to airbrush whatever happened there. The BJP government definitely wants to recall ‘the past’ and 2013 would be evoked too, but the recall can only be on its terms. Not Sacco’s account.Sacco met the controversial espouser of militant Hindutva Yati Narsinghanand for this book and he features big in this account, openly making a case for the erasure of Muslims, pointing to genocidal intent. Others not from the area have been familiar with his online presence and urgings at public gatherings in the past six years. Sacco’s representation would have given credence to the objective of the Modi government, especially in the electorally crucial state of Uttar Pradesh, to practice a policy encouraging a complete fracture of voters along religious lines. But alas, that is for domestic audiences. Globally, it is stuck in a bid to project a ‘vibrant democracy’ and an all-is-well spirit, sounding nearly Nehruvian in words chosen when the PM visits Norway, for instance. Yoga, zero, Jews-and-Muslims-came-centuries-ago are deployed. Sacco’s sharp lines break these silos and draw the full picture.The book’s title is invoked inside his account when he explains how Muzaffarnagar is one in a chain that Partition, Ayodhya and Gujarat violence are a part of. These are explained as breaks in the story of what modern India has been trying to do since 1950 – be a beacon not fully sunk in the subcontinental morass of respective majoritarian positioning. That explicit connection, of Muzaffarnagar with Ayodhya and Gujarat, may have fully terrified Penguin Random House India. “Violence, being intentionally mixed with democracy,” to ensure a more durable base for some parties, is something Joe Sacco is led to think deeply about after his visit to Western UP. Sacco writes about Narendra Modi in 2002 as Gujarat chief minister, carrying the model to post-2014 India. That would have definitely made it to the “five pages” of changes the publisher wanted. Remember what happened to the BBC documentary on Gujarat violence in 2023 (and after that to the BBC).That Muzaffarnagar is not merely the past but a manual for some very powerful people, a way of trying to configure society in the future and take democracy down a purely majoritarian path, may be the actual reason the publishers pulled out and sent Sacco requests to change his story. Sacco’s questions about the need to study and understand Muzaffarnagar is to ensure that it does not become another template to follow. He warns that it provides a path for the ultra-right to capture democracy. It is perhaps that map that Sacco unfolds that makes present day regime supporters deeply uncomfortable.