While handling so many secessionist movements for such a long time, the Indians state authorities have developed some unique techniques to torture the people fighting for freedom from the Indian Union rule, including the Kashmiris. Some of these techniques were mentioned in a recent issue of India’s Sunday Magazine.

Some excerpts from the magazine: 1. The Aeroplane Treatment: About the first thing that suspected terrorists or harbourers were put through in the backrooms of many police stations in the Punjab in those dark years of terror. Gradually, in many places, it replaced intelligent questioning, Security forces in Kashmir also made wild use of it. It has caused limbs to be amputated and even death.

The accused is hung upside down. It starts getting bad as soon as the blood rushes to the head. The second stage of torture commences from here, starting with the beating of the soles. Even without this, heavily-built men can withstand the ‘aeroplane’ treatment only for a few seconds. Lighter men can put up with it for not more than ten minutes.

2. The Bombay cuf.: A variant of the aeroplane; method: The prisoner’s hands are tied behind his back and a pipe is placed under his knees. He is then elevated just above ground level. It is impossible for anybody to remain in that position, with the body weight entirely on the knees, for more than a few seconds.

3. The Roller Method: Perfected in Kashmir, the prisoner is forcibly laid on his back. Then a round pole is rolled over his legs and body, sometimes with the tortures standing on either end of it and rolling it up and down. Terribly painful, and with long term consequences. 

4. Cog Needle: A thin iron rod is inserted through the umbilicus, tearing the skin and the muscles, or up the anus damaging the muscles, or up the arms damaging the mucus membrane and other parts of the rectum.

5. Bellary: One of the oldest torture techniques, and still prevalent. A stick smeared with red chilli powder or green chilli paste is thrust into the anus. 6. Electric Shocks in the Ureter: All the above techniques are applied during investigations only when state authorities do not wish to kill the arrested person; otherwise, the most preferred technique, as is being practiced in the occupied Kashmir, is ‘Shoot at Sight’.

Consequently, in the last over seen years, hundreds of thousands of innocent Kashmiri people have been killed by the Indian Security forces. As regards, the total number of people killed in the Occupied Kashmir since 1989, the Indian government estimate is over 15,000 including over 11,000 Indian security personnel. The AFP and Reuters Puts the total number of deaths in the same period at over 20,000, while the

All Parties Hurriyat Conference and Farooq Abdullah put this number at 50,000. About the techniques of torture, the Sunday magazine further writes: "Police officers will tell you that the worst torture scenes in Hindi cinemas are nowhere near to the horror of the real thing. Slapping and Kicking and caning are the more easily portrayable forms of gratuitous police violence. Less shown, are the horrors beginning with hanging a prisoner upside down, pulling, his fingernails out, setting fire to his paraffin-coated legs, or giving him electric shocks.

Doctors at the Soura Institute of Medical Sciences (SIMS) in Srinagar have discovered a condition from treating thousands of torture victims that they call ‘physical Torture Nephropathy.’ It is a renal failure set off by a combination of dehydration and breakdown of soft issues during torture. One hundred and fifty such cases are registered with SIMS just now. The case-sheet of all these patients reveal they were beaten on the buttocks, back and limbs and given the ‘roller’ treatment along with electric shocks. Doctors at the Soura Institute say that undiagnosed cases of mild renal failure are being treated outside Soura at other hospitals and their number runs into thousands." Back in the 1980s, the Indian state authorities had crushed a popular uprising in the

East Punjab with the help of a similar process of killing and torture, for which the then police chief KPS Gill won the due notoriety. On India human rights violations in the Occupied Kashmir, Amnesty International writes that torture by security forces is a daily routine and so brutal that hundreds have died so far, Amnesty warns that "the entire civilian population is at risk. Torture includes beatings and electric shocks, hanging people upside down for many hours, crushing their legs with heavy rollers, and burning parts of their bodies".  In a recent issue of the prestigious international magazine, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Surinder Singh Oberoi who has covered the Occupied Kashmir happenings for AFP for the last over seven years, writes about the reason why Indian state authorities would like to continue their gory campaign of torture and killing in Occupied Kashmir. "For India, relenting on the question of Kashmir independence would invite dissent from other Indian states who are watching developments in Kashmir.

There is already unrest in the northeastern states and Punjab; Indian would not dare to stir up more trouble in these regions, and hence will always try to linger on the Kashmir issue on one pretext or another." In the same article, titled Kashmir is Bleeding, Oberoi narrated a personal incident, indicating yet another form of Indian brutality: the state-sponsoring of a counter-insurgency movement in occupied Kashmir. He writes "Last July, I was one of the 19 Journalists traveling in a chartered bus to a press conference in Southern Kashmir. At Anantnag, about 45 miles south of the Kashmiri capital of Srinagar, we were stopped by dozen Kashmiri youths armed with AK-57s.

They ordered the by driver to follow them, and at gunpoint we were guided to a private home. Once inside, we realised we were guests of the jamu and Kashmir Kkhwan (Brotherhood), a counter-insurgent group founded by Indian security. Our captors complained that the local press who they said was sympathetic to the separatists’ cause-had ignored their orders to stop publishing.

They told us that all coverage of the insurgency must stop. Six local newsmen were moved to another part of the house and threatened with executionl The rest of us, all members of the national and international press, remained together. The tale goes on to explain the extent to which the Indian state authorities have gone to crush a popular uprising with the use of arms, by launching counter-insurgents and through using the various techniques of torture.

The widely held perception among state authorities is that, as it had happened in the Punjab, the uprising in occupied Cashmere might eventually come to an end as a result of the Indian state’s terror tactics.