In 2019, Nida Rehman bought a parrot named Noor. Her family got annoyed with her spending all day talking to her pet. They asked her to release the bird, but she wasn’t convinced. “I loved Noor. I, too, felt caged like her,” she said.
Rehman lives in Indian-administered Kashmir, where the Indian government imposed an indefinite curfew in August 2019 and cut all communication channels, including telephone and internet services. The Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party government scrapped a constitutional article that provided a certain autonomy to the north Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir—and then put local leaders under house arrest, imposed a brutal crackdown on protests, and split the Muslim-majority state into two union territories, Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, to be governed by the central government.
