AP Photo

Last week, on the Monday before Eid, Mohammad Shafi Wani opened his grocery store in Srinagar's Karan Nagar neighbourhood. Each of his gestures —rolling up the shutter, dusting off the shelves, opening the long-locked cash till — was an act of defiance, perhaps even suicidal rashness.

Kashmir's Tehreek-e-Hurriyat, the anti-India Islamist coalition spearheading the protests that have claimed more than 80 lives in clashes with police this year, had decreed that shops would remain shut until 2:00 pm; Wani had opened for business at mid-day. “Get lost,” a local resident recalls Wani saying to two...