Viagra, the male potency wonder drug, has a thriving market among young men rendered sexually dysfunctional by living under incessant stress and violence for over a decade in the disputed state of Kashmir.
Doctors in the state's summer capital Srinagar said Kashmir's civil war for an independent Islamic homeland, which has claimed nearly 30,000 lives, had spawned a generation of youngsters suffering from depression and stress, which in turn led to psychosexual disorders.
In desperation, these young men, many in their mid-20s, turned to the expensive, but officially banned blue Viagra pill for sexual succour.
"Depressive disorders are common here," said Dr Mushtaq Margroob, a leading Kashmiri psychiatrist in Srinagar, who estimated that over three-quarters of patients seeking medical help suffered from some form of depression triggered by living constantly under stress.
Scores of chemists in Srinagar admitted to selling Viagra clandestinely to a host of young men for over 500 rupees (about £9) a tablet. One chemist at Dal gate in the heart of Srinagar claimed to have received 10,000 rupees (about £160) for one Viagra tablet from a desperate youngster last year.
"Many youngsters feel humiliated asking for Viagra in public and come when we are about to close for the day or wait till there is no other customer in the shop," one chemist said. He said the number of Viagra customers from rural areas was growing steadily as militancy had spread to virtually every village across the Kashmir valley.
Doctors said some of their young patients were victims of torture by the security forces, interrogated brutally with electric current passed through their genitals. "Often the victim is rendered impotent, not by the electric shock but by the psychological fallout of the torture," one doctor said.
In all such cases he prescribed Viagra as it had an immediate effect, easing the young man's fears that he was impotent for life. "Since the problem in many cases is more psychological than physiological, the patient feels his libido has been restored after taking Viagra a few times and does not need it any more," the doctor said.
Medical officials said Viagra sales were not permitted in the state but they had neither personnel nor motivation to prevent it being sold. The tablets were imported into the state from New Delhi by hundreds of wholesalers and distributed to thousands of retail chemists across the Kashmir valley.
There are over 4,600 chemists and some 700 wholesale medicine dealers in the valley, whose five-odd million residents are the largest consumers of medicine in northern India.
Young Kashmiri men are not the only ones suffering mental stress in the violence-riven state.
The Defence Minister, Mr George Fernandes, told parliament recently that combat stress in fighting insurgents in Kashmir had led to over 20 incidents of army personnel killing their own colleagues since 1997.
Deployed on a constant state of alertness, an increasing number of army and paramilitary personnel were cracking up under pressure and instances of "fragging", where soldiers shot dead their colleagues before killing themselves, were steadily multiplying.
Senior army officers in Kashmir privately admitted to many more instances of "fragging", which are never made public out of respect for the dead soldiers' families and for reasons of insurance payments. After over a decade of fighting Muslim insurgents in Kashmir, the Indian army finally accepted last month that combat stress is indeed a grave problem and has decided to initiate special measures to deal with it.
The army has been fighting various insurgencies in north-eastern India for nearly 50 years and in Kashmir since 1989.