#EmergencyTortureTales
"As soon as a woman comes in, she is stripped naked in front of everyone else. When a human being is sentenced, he or she is punished enough. Must the human body be degraded and humiliated as well? Who is responsible for these perverse methods?" 1/n
"As soon as a woman comes in, she is stripped naked in front of everyone else. When a human being is sentenced, he or she is punished enough. Must the human body be degraded and humiliated as well? Who is responsible for these perverse methods?" 1/n
In her prison diary, actress Snehalatha Reddy (pic) wrote what happened to her after she was picked up by police in May 1976. She was held without trial in Bangalore Central Jail, where she endured regular torture. This is what Mahatma Gandhi's followers did in the 1970s. 2/n
On two occasions in prison, Snehalatha went into an asthmatic coma. With her health failing, she was eventually released on parole in January 1977. Five days later, she passed away as a result of chronic asthma and a debilitating lung infection. 3/n
DU student leader Hemant Kumar Bishnoi was kept awake the whole night and in the morning policemen started raining punches on him. He was then suspended upside down on a stick between two chairs and beaten up again. Cops wanted to know about Jan Sangh leader ML Khurana. 4/n
Cops poured water in his mouth to suffocate him. (The milder version the Americans used on Al-Qaeda terrorists is called waterboarding). When this failed to break Bishnoi, burning candles were applied to his soles and chill powder was smeared into his nose and his rectum. 5/n
Om Prakash was also hung upside down and his testicles were poked with a rod. Narashimha Rao, a graduate student at Bangalore, had his hands lashed behind him with rope which was strung through a pulley on the ceiling. 6/n
Rao was hauled a few feet above the ground and left dangling for 20 minutes there, with all his weight pulling on his painfully tied hands. In Indira Gandhi's India, this agonizing torture was called "the aeroplane". 7/n
To extract the whereabouts of George Fernandes (picture), his brother Lawrence was threatened that his mother would be brought to jail and raped in front of him. He was beaten on face with such force that two of his front teeth were knocked out. 8/n
At the time of his release at the end of Emergency, Lawrence looked like a live skeleton. He had a permanent limp and serious psychological damage. For many years he lived as a wreck. 9/n
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