Penguin Random House India (PRHI) chickens out again. And I'm not just talking about the collapsed deal for Congress leader Sonia Gandhi's highly anticipated memoir, Belonging: A Journey of Love, but the trend behind it. Big publishers carry bigger responsibility, but it turns out PRHI develops cold feet — it lacks the courage of its convictions.

In the case of Sonia's memoir, PRHI's legal and editorial teams demanded changes or deletions to certain sensitive passages, which Sonia, quite understandably, firmly and plainly refused. PRHI insisted a "fact check" was required on passages detailing her personal impressions from official meetings with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, his leadership style, and the policies of the central government — as well as on her account of Chinese incursions along India's borders, and her comments on the role of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in India's social history, which weren’t flattering. PRHI denied any political pressure but offered no explanation for why these fact checks were required only for the Indian edition.

This is not an isolated incident but part of a well-established pattern. PRHI seemed more than willing to withdraw and pulp all remaining copies of American Indologist Wendy Doniger's The Hindus: An Alternative History. Nor should we forget that a book by arguably the world's greatest living graphic novelist, Joe Sacco — The Once and Future Riot, based on the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots — was also pulled by PRHI, allegedly over the use of an "inaccurate" map of India. Sacco has said on record that the publisher was looking for "excuses" to pull out of the project. "It's embarrassing that the Indian publisher does not want to distribute a book like this because of the current political climate in India," he reportedly said.

More recently, PRHI was entangled in a national-security dispute over former Indian Army Chief General M.M. Naravane's memoir, Four Stars of Destiny, after Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi quoted leaked passages on sensitive India-China border tensions on the floor of the Lok Sabha, ahead of the book's official release. Delhi Police's Special Cell registered an FIR, and PRHI, predictably, swung into action at once — halting the rollout and pugnaciously clarifying that it had not published or distributed any digital or physical copies, perhaps to save its own neck. The neck stayed safe; the grit was the casualty.

On the other hand, when PRHI published books exploring the ideological and electoral rise of the RSS and the BJP — academic, analytical works like Republic of Hindutva, The Rise of the BJP, and Vinay Sitapati's Jugalbandi: The BJP Before Modi — without much fuss.

Which makes PRHI's risk-aversion look less like caution and more like something closer to subservience. And why blame the government for it? There are dozens of smaller publishers, run on a shoestring, would happily take on any of the books PRHI seems too scared to touch.

Sonia's memoir will find plenty of takers too. Standard fact-checking and editorial review, it seems, have become a convenient pretext for pre-emptive censorship — a way to dodge costly court battles or avoid government ire. Dispensing with moral courage, after all, costs nothing. Despite everything, PRHI still maintains: "We remain willing and keen to publish the book."