Since Sunday, mobile networks and internet services have been suspended. At least 300 leaders have been detained and public gatherings banned, effectively confining residents to their homes to stop protests in the revolt-torn region. With a near-total telecoms blackout, there is very little news trickling out of Kashmir, regional leaders said.

“There will be ‘some relaxation’ for Friday prayers”, K. Vijay Kumar, an adviser to the state’s governor, told the Indian Express newspaper. “The forces have been given flexibility to impose prohibitory orders with minimum force and maximum compassion,” Kumar said, adding there had been only a few cases of stone pelting in parts of Srinagar.

The prayers are likely to be held in neighbourhood mosques and not the main Jama Masjid mosque which remained closed, media said.

Seeking to tighten its grip on the contested region, the Indian government this week withdrew the state’s right to frame its own laws and allowed non-residents to buy property.

Thousands of additional paramilitary troops flooded into Kashmir, already one of the world’s most militarised regions, ahead of Monday’s announcement of the change in the region’s constitutional status. Television showed footage of paramilitary soldiers patrolling empty streets in the city, a hotbed of the 30-year revolt in which more than 50,000 people have died.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government also broke up the state into two federal territories, a step regional leaders decried as a further humiliation.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was concerned over reports of restrictions in the Indian side of Kashmir, and warned that such action could “exacerbate the human rights situation in region,” his spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric, said in a statement on Thursday.