Aniruddha Bahal

This is from Aniruddha Bahal’s Bunker 13. Bahal is the journalist who did a sting on Indian defence procurement which exposed the BJP Defence Minister of the day in naked bribe-taking and caused Vajpayee’s government such embarrassment that the Minister had to step down from office for a few months until the hub-hub died down.
Bunker 13 is gung-ho and laddish, violent and amoral, the `you` narrator is a bit irritating and the final twist is maybe sentimental, but it’s a terrific book. The following says something about torture, which a couple of British people on The Moral Maze, one apparently called Melanie Philips, were discussing as if it were a slightly dubious but guiltily pleasurable consumer product from Tesco.
A journalist is talking to Major Kholi of the indian Army up on the Kashmir LoC. She asks him about torture.
“The locals coming back after three months of Mossie mumbo-jumbo and basic arms training know no secrets that we can squeeze out of them. We just ask them their name. They don’t want to tell us, we don’t waste our calories kicking their balls. We cook some name up. Exercise our imagination. Shift our workload to Srinigar where the guys are trained for sorting out confusion. They have procedures. They open a file in the name we have given the Mossie. Then they interrogate the fucker twice a day for three months, sponge him of all he knows and transcribe what he says on white sheets of paper and run it through their encryption machines or whatever the fuck they have there. But the basic problem remains - the guy knows nothing. So he has to keep inventing stuff to keep the guys off his back. And when you are tossing data out of the blue you don’t often remember it the same way the second time around and you end up contradicting yourself. That’s the opening the interrogator is looking for to prove to himself that you are hiding something and so he extends your interrogation schedule by another month. At the end of it your average Mossie just goes dumb, he has a problem even getting the alphabets right. When you get to that stage the interrogators at Papa 2 jump you to the list of hardcore nuts. Once you get to that status...”
Bunker 13 is published by Faber, 2003