A child peers out from a shop in Srinagar as Indian troops enforce a security clampdown in the state

In the apple orchards of southern Kashmir, young men huddle among the trees trying to avoid being picked up in another security sweep of their homes by the Indian army.

“They took nine boys last night,” said one, who did not want to be named. The army and local police rounded them up, beat some and took others away, he claimed.

“I jumped off the roof as I heard them barge in and arrest my younger brother,” said another, Irfan Ahmad Mir, a green-eyed young medical student. He escaped but said he was petrified the security forces would return for him.

It is a month since Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, stripped India’s troubled and only Muslim-majority state of its autonomy and imposed direct