When I first read that the Kerala High Court had entertained a PIL against Arundhati Roy’s latest book cover, I laughed out loud. Not because it was funny, but because the absurdity left me no other option. Here was a constitutional court - with dockets overflowing with bail pleas, land disputes, habeas petitions and constitutional challenges - being asked to decide whether the jacket of a novel, because it shows the author smoking a cigarette, needs a statutory health warning. I laughed, and then I raged.

The petitioner clarified, with a lawyer’s care, that his challenge was not to the “literary substance” of Mother Mary Comes to Me. No, the problem lay outside the text- the cover photo, Roy with a cigarette. According to him, this image “glorifies” smoking, especially for “teenage girls and womenfolk,” and therefore violates the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act, 2003 (COTPA). In his view, unless the cover is reissued with a warning label, “Smoking is injurious to health”, the book amounts to indirect tobacco advertising.

I have read PILs that stretch statutory language before. But this one does something else - it weaponises a health law to police an image, an aesthetic choice, a woman’s posture. The offence here is not tobacco, but that Arundhati Roy, a woman and an intellectual long mistrusted by the establishment, is pictured smoking - publicly, unapologetically, visibly.

It reminded me of what Arvind Rajagopal once described in Politics After Television - the Indian state’s peculiar anxiety over images. Words can be countered, debated, rebutted. But certain images like that of a protester bleeding, a dissenter smiling, or as in the present case, of a woman smoking, carry a different power, one that is harder to domesticate. Which is why, time and again, the law is pressed into service to contain them.

The petitioner’s gendered framing gives the game away. He says teenage girls and women are especially vulnerable to this depiction. The law student in me asks - what empirical evidence supports this? The citizen in me answers - none. What matters is not evidence, but enforcement of conformity. Girls must be told not just that smoking is bad, but that to smoke in public, to smoke on a book cover, no less, is scandalous. The cigarette is not the issue; the woman holding it is.

It is tempting to dismiss this PIL as a triviality. After all, compared to undertrial prisoners languishing for years, what is one book cover? But triviality is a trap. The political theorist Kim-Lane Scheppele once wrote, “Constitutions are not only killed by coups, but by a thousand little cuts.”

In the same way, free expression is not only silenced by sedition cases and bans, but by countless small acts of policing - what you can eat, what you can watch, what you can wear and, now, what you can put on a dust jacket.

Consider how COTPA has been applied before - blurred cigarettes in films, health warnings during on-screen smoking, disclaimers interrupting stories. The absurdity is not new. But the move from fiction to authorial image is significant. As the media scholar and Professor Lawrence Liang has argued, censorship in India is less about suppressing content than about disciplining citizens. The cigarette on Roy’s cover is not an advertisement; it is a refusal to conform. The law steps in, not to protect health, but to punish that refusal.

I cannot help but recall other moments of judicial energy spent on image-policing. The Supreme Court once heard arguments about whether films showing liquor needed statutory warnings. High Courts have banned art exhibitions, music albums, even stand-up comedy shows on grounds of “public morality.” In each instance, the law is stretched from health statutes to obscenity codes to PIL jurisdiction, to target not harm, but discomfort.

Meanwhile, undertrial prisoners wait in custody waiting for hearings. Labourers fight for unpaid wages while inspectors look the other way. As Rohit De’s A People’s Constitution reminds us, PIL was born as a tool for social justice. What we see here is its afterlife - a weapon to regulate aesthetics, morality and identity.

When I look at Roy’s cover, I do not see a tobacco advertisement. I see a writer unafraid to inhabit her own skin. I see a photograph that captures a certain defiance. I see, above all, the folly that one thinks stamping “Smoking is injurious to health” on a book cover will protect women from harm, even as it fails to protect women from violence, discrimination or unequal pay.

The irony is cruel - statutory health warnings proliferate, but statutory rights wither.

So, what does this PIL really teach us? Not that smoking is dangerous; most of us knew that already. Not that statutory warnings save lives, because evidence suggests otherwise. What it teaches us is that law may have become addicted to symbolism. The more intractable our crises - unemployment, inequality, violence - the more energy is spent on cigarette packs, food labels, film disclaimers and now book covers.

It teaches us that women who speak their mind will not only be contested for their words, but surveilled for their images. It is not enough to attack Roy’s novels and essays; her photograph must also be brought to heel.

And yet, I return to the laughter with which I began. Because in the face of such absurdity, sometimes laughter is the only form of resistance left. Living with law in India today feels the same - a tragicomedy of misplaced priorities.

But laughter, like smoke, disperses. What lingers is rage. Rage that courts can find time for this PIL while liberty petitions gather dust. Rage that women are infantilised in the name of “protection.” Rage that literature is policed not by its words, but by its covers.

A lawyer, a writer, a reader in India today is oscillating, as always, between hilarity and rage. And to hope, foolishly perhaps, that one day courts will learn to tell the difference between protecting health and policing defiance.

Anubhuti Raje is a final year law student at Gujarat National Law University.