In an age of rapid proliferation and dissemination of information through visual, graphic, printed and multimedia material, we still encounter a disturbing practice of libricide, smothering and challenging our notion of free exchange of ideas. Libricide is an extreme form of censorship, protest and hate mongering spanning across different times and spaces. It is an established fact that knowledge is power and libricide is a wanton desecration of knowledge. Book burnings are insidiously powerful and symbolic acts of eliminating ideas/values and the resultant concomitant is the intent to erase the cultures or beliefs deemed as a potential threat to the ruling powers. It is a strategic and calculated destruction to obliterate supposedly ‘blasphemous’ or ‘politically seditious’ content from the psyche of common masses. The history of exterminating books, sometimes coupled with eliminating the writers, is as much a part of current milieu as it was of earlier times. The world has witnessed biblioclasm at its worst in the twentieth-century. South-Asian countries, where the religious fervour and communal vigour overpowers all other sensibilities, have particularly been vulnerable to the vandalism caused upon the publication of a work, part or whole of which is deemed sacrilegious or defamatory to a religious community, political group or social setup. The present paper attempts to uncover the history of banning and burning of two novels (The Satanic Verses and Lajja written by Salman Rushdie and Taslima Nasreen, respectively), and the serious repercussions which followed in its wake. Along with the death threat faced by novelists, the libricide also served as a prelude or a corollary to the massive human destruction caused by the riots they provoked in its aftermath.