Sometime in August, I was assigned a story by the editor of Article 14. I accepted and in the course of my research, I found that some active Twitter users, who often posted tweets about contentious issues in Kashmir, had gone quiet.
The facts were not new. The Kashmir Walla, a Kashmir-based website, had reported extensively on the issue, as had others, within and outside India (here and here). The facts were that the police had probed 300 social-media accounts, calling them a “cyber-bullying group”.
I tracked down some of these users, who on condition of anonymity said they had been questioned, hectored by police and left off only after promising not to issue posts against the government and its policies. The specific tweets the police objected to related to, the users said, the abrogation of Article 370 (the constitutional provision that merged the former kingdom of…