Battling stress, Indian soldiers tap yoga

Sitting in the lotus position, his legs crossed, his eyes closed, his breath even, his arms draped against his knees, his back erect, and his tensions melting into the earth beneath him, Om Prakash is slowly putting the worries of the world out of his mind.

Om Prakash is not the latest Hollywood yoga teacher. (At least, not yet.) He's a soldier in India's Central Reserve Police Force, and he's performing yoga to take away the stress that has already claimed the lives of a half-dozen Indian soldiers this year, many of them at their own hands.

"Before yoga, there was a chance I could have died," says Mr. Prakash, who says he suffered from depression both in Kashmir and in his previous conflict-zone deployment in the troubled Indian state of Tripura. "But now, with yoga, it's much better. It is very difficult to work in such a situation, but now I find it is very easy. My mind is at peace."

Embraced by fashionable Westerners as a way to exercise and get in touch with, well, whatever, yoga has now become a necessary component of India's 17-year-long counterinsurgency effort in the disputed state of Kashmir. While the recent suicides and fratricides among Indian troops in the Army and other forces remain statistically small, the sudden string of such incidents prompted officials to act. India's main counter-insurgency police force in Kashmir has begun requiring its paramilitary troops to "de-stress" as a way to cope with the tensions of a conflict that shows no sign of ending. Soldiers in butterfly poses may not be what the ancient yogis had in mind, but it's already delivering results.

"After performing operations, our soldiers are under stress, and to get out of that and achieve health, they do yoga," says Dilip Singh, spokesman for the CRPF in Srinagar. "Yoga is adopted to keep the mind in control, so that they remain controlled in their actions."

For a handful of paramilitary troops in the estimated 600,000 Indian troop presence in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, these yoga exercises are coming a bit too late.

•On Jan. 25, 2006, Police Constable Avatar Singh of the 96th Battalion shot dead four of his colleagues and injured another inside a security camp in the Hawal area of Srinagar after allegedly being denied leave. The sound of firing had led security agencies to believe militants had attacked the camp on the eve of India's Republic Day.

•On April 20, 2006, Chander Paul, an inspector in the Border Security Force committed suicide by hanging himself in his room inside a training center near Srinagar airport. Mr. Paul, resident of Uttar Pradesh, was reported to be tense over a family problem.

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