India, Jan. 25 -- When Kashmir's chief cleric Mirwaiz Umar Farooq quietly removed the description"Hurriyat chairman"from his X (formerly Twitter) bio in late December, the change appeared minor on the surface. In reality, it captured a much deeper shift: the narrowing of political space for separatist voices and the steady fading of an organisation that once claimed to represent Kashmir's dissident conscience.

Mirwaiz said the decision followed sustained pressure from authorities. "For some time now, I was being pressed by the authorities to make changes to my X (formerly Twitter) handle as Hurriyat chairman," he wrote. Officials, he said, warned that since "all the constituents of Hurriyat Conference, including the Awami Action Committe...