In general, India’s endemic insurgencies and outbreaks of rural violence tend to be dwarfed, at least as news stories, by the more serious challenges facing neighbouring countries like Pakistan. It’s also worth remembering that many 19th and 20th century European states had problems controlling the countryside, especially during periods of political and economic change.

The Indian state’s response to violent separatism, terrorism and armed revolution is not what you might expect given political India’s traditional tendency to lecture Western countries about “imperialism”. For example, few people know about the “dirty war” counter-insurgency operations in Punjab, which followed the storming of Amritsar’s Golden Temple in 1984. These broke the back of extremist Sikh separatism. But they involved unlawful detention, torture and the deaths of at least 10,000 people at the hands of police and state-sponsored death squads.

These days, in the Indian-administered part of Kashmir, the Indian army enjoys surprising popularity thanks to its relief role in the October 2005 earthquake and improved efforts to win the hearts and minds of Kashmiris. However, the earthquake came 16 years into a conflict during which the area was under almost constant occupation by up to 500,000 troops, and in which at least 50,000 people have been killed. There has been extreme brutality on both sides, but the story of the security forces’ human-rights abuses is unfolding as NGOs investigate periods when the media and aid agencies were excluded from the Kashmir valley. Disappearances, arbitrary detentions, torture and extrajudicial execution in the form of staged “encounters” have all come to light. Rapes by the security forces have been so common that many Kashmiris believe it is a deliberate policy.