“They said that officially you cannot publish the newspapers for at least three days because the situation was volatile,” Mr. Bukhari said. “In a way, they told us that the newspapers were a threat to peace.”

In 2010, newspapers were not printed for several days during monthslong unrest, partly Mr. Bukhari said, because a curfew prevented the staff from reaching the office. In another wave of unrest in 2013, the police seized newspapers in response to popular protests, he said. But Saturday was different.

“This is the first time we have been officially censored,” Mr. Bukhari said.

The authorities have been known to operate with a heavy hand in Indian-administered Kashmir, the source of a bitter dispute between India and Pakistan. The region has been scarred by a cycle of insurgency, civil unrest and crackdown. The violence peaked in the 1990s, but a heavy military presence remains, as India accuses Pakistan of continuing to support violent militants there; Pakistan accuses India of unjustly annexing Kashmir and abusing its Muslim-majority population.

“It is a temporary measure to address an extraordinary situation,” Naeem Akhtar, the state education minister and government spokesman, told The Indian Express of the suspension of newspaper printing. Young people, he told the paper, get charged up “due to certain projections in the media, which results in multiplication of tragedies.”

Mr. Akhtar was not reachable by phone on Monday, and the divisional commissioner of Kashmir did not confirm or deny the ban. But on Monday evening, Amitabh Mattoo, the adviser to the chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir State, denied that the government had issued a ban.