No copies made public: Naravane on book row

Eight days after his unpublished memoir Four Stars of Destiny triggered a political firestorm that is still raging, former army chief General (retired) Manoj Mukund Naravane on Tuesday broke his silence on the controversial autobiography and endorsed his publisher's stand that the book was not published and no copies were “published, distributed, sold or otherwise made available to the public” either in print or digital form.

- Rahul Singh

“This is the status of the book,” he wrote on X, quoting a statement posted by Penguin Random House India on the social media platform on Monday. The post by the publishing house came hours after Delhi Police registered an FIR and launched a probe into the alleged illegal circulation of the manuscript in digital and other formats.

To be sure, the book was to be published in January 2024, and news agency Press Trust of India carried an excerpt from it in December 2023. Around the same time, Naravane also tweeted that his book “is available now” and pointed to a pre-order link from Amazon.

It isn’t clear whether the publisher and the author did not seek army and defence ministry approval (as required for any book published by an army officer on issues related to the army and the country’s security), or whether they had sought one and believed it would be a formality (like it usually is).

But the PTI excerpt, on the Agniveer scheme, created a controversy and the defence ministry wrote to Naravane and the publisher to submit the book for clearance to the army before publishing it. The army went through the book in detail, recorded its observations on the subjects covered in it, and sent it to the defence ministry to take the final call. The defence ministry has thus far not given its clearance to the book.

But people familiar with how the publishing business works said on condition of anonymity that it is quite likely that copies of the book were printed, and soft copies (in the form of PDFs) sent to people for blurbs and endorse- ‘ments. It is even plausible that some copies were sent to retail stores and e-retailers and then recalled, these people added.

Technically, though, the book has never been published.