On 1 September 1939, two days before Britain and France declared war on Germany, the GOI imposed censorship on telegrams going out from India, and also shut down wireless, telegram and telephone services till further notice. On the same day, the government of New Zealand issued regulations regarding censorship and publicity, the Canadian government assumed special emergency powers over censorship and the German government instructed Germans over the wireless ‘to make it their duty to ignore broadcasts from abroad … designed to undermine the patriotism of the people’. Surveillance and censorship in India was ‘substantially relaxed’ only six years later, after formal Japanese surrender. Conventional wisdom holds that with the coming of the Second World War, ‘all powers assumed by the government were fully exercised and the civil and military censors … freely suppressed events and views of political significance on the ground that such publication impeded the effective prosecution of the war.’ The two chapters in this part of the book question and complicate this neat picture of successful censorship during wartime.