Gen Naravane memoir entered global markets before govt approval: Delhi Police

The controversy surrounding Naravane's memoir, which erupted after Congress MP Rahul Gandhi sought to cite it in Parliament last week, shows no signs of abating. The matter has now escalated into a police case, with an FIR registered after Gandhi was seen holding up a copy. The memoir is still awaiting mandatory clearance from the Defence Ministry and has not yet been officially published.

Amid the ongoing row over former Army Chief General MM Naravane’s memoir Four Stars of Destiny, the Delhi Police Special Cell has launched a multi-nation investigation into its alleged leak. According to sources, the book entered global digital markets before receiving the mandatory clearance from the Defence Ministry.

Preliminary findings have suggested that the leak was not an isolated act of piracy but a “planned and coordinated operation” that bypassed official approval processes meant for defence-related publications.

An FIR has been registered under criminal conspiracy charges, and investigators are now tracking digital and financial trails in the US, Canada, Germany and Australia, where the book was allegedly available online before clearance.

Investigators have found that the leaked version of Naravane's memoir was not only circulated internationally but was first made available online in foreign markets. Online sales were detected on platforms operating in the US, Canada, Australia and Germany.

Sources said the first upload of the leaked material was traced to a website using the “.io” domain extension — a country code top-level domain (ccTLD) originally assigned to the British Indian Ocean Territory and widely used by tech platforms and startups.

The content was subsequently mirrored across multiple hosting platforms.