The guns that harm India

Govt offers bullet trains for everyone else but pellet guns for Kashmiris. No wonder their newspapers read different

The newspapers in Srinagar, where this is being written from, look and read like they are from another country. There’s no reference to the story coming from Ahmedabad, delivering a bullet train for Gujaratis, on any of the front pages. 

Some papers (and Kashmir has dozens of dailies) have chosen to lead with a story on the United Nations and some dispute between India and Pakistan. It is noticeable that many of the Urdu dailies have framed the engagement as “Pak o Hind” rather than the other way around. 

Most newspapers, nine in 10, have led with the release of a report by Amnesty India (for which I work) on the blindings and other damages caused to civilians by what is called the “pellet gun”. It sounds like a toy but is in reality a deadly weapon. It is a 12 gauge shotgun that fires birdshot, so called because it is used to hunt birds. The spread of the “shot”, the lead projectiles, is wide, dispersing over an area much wider than the target. And not being rifled, meaning fired out through a spiral groove that keeps accuracy, the birdshot goes anywhere. 

The report documented blindings and injuries to children as young as nine, and women who were in their homes and standing on balconies when they were hit and their eyes torn out. A total of 88 people have been profiled on how their lives have changed after the violence. Another 16 of those who have been hit, including in the eyes, are members of the police and paramilitaries, showing that this is a weapon that is dangerous even for those who wield it. And this total of 16 only comes from one RTI that was returned properly filled out. It is probable that the numbers of Indian police and paramilitary personnel injured by the shotgun are far greater. 

In most of the cases that have been profiled, the pellets are still inside their faces, their heads, their bodies. Untrained and unprepared doctors may have been too afraid to take them out, fearing further damage in the act of removing them. 

The majority of the families of the 88 individuals, who were not easy to locate, say that the victims have undergone a transformation. They report that the individuals have become irritable (the word “arrogant” was also used for some of the girls and young women who were blinded). Some of them spoke at the event but in Kashmiri and so I wasn’t able to pick out what they said. Later, I approached one of them, a small man, to have a conversation. I extended my hand to shake his but he didn’t respond and it took me a moment to realise he couldn’t see me.

Some of the older victims are having to figure out how to enter a new trade, not being equipped any longer for the one their bodies and eyes had trained. Many of the children who are students can no longer study. The horror of what we have wrought on the Kashmiris is explained away with such casual logic (“they are stone pelters so they deserve blindness”) that it will anger the individual not lobotomised by our current fierce nationalism. 

It should be said here that many of the victims were not easy to locate. The police have filed FIRs against those who went to hospitals. Meaningful compensation and rehabilitation from the government, of course, is not even being discussed, even by the local government, for whatever reason (I suspect because they also fear being called traitors if they help the victims). 

This is shamefully a weapon we use only against Kashmiris. Into no other protesting Indian crowd do we fire the shotgun. Protests by Patidars and Jats and followers of Deras are not set upon by men firing this weapon, permanently damaging bystanders. 

When I said this to the authorities I spoke to, one individual said jokingly this should be changed — by firing it at crowds around India. This will never happen, of course. 

A journalist asked me why this wasn’t the case and why, if the shotgun was such a harmless and effective weapon of crowd control, it wasn’t used against other Indians. I said that if we had documented 88 cases of Gujaratis or Marathis who had had their eyes blown out for protesting, heads would have rolled and the governments would have had to answer to the people and to the courts. With Kashmiris it is different. We are different and we should not be surprised that their papers read so differently from ours. Their world is different. 

Illustration by Binay Sinha

So what can be done? All the individuals I spoke to in authority said that they accepted that the use of the shotgun was causing damage that was permanent and disproportionate to the force required for crowd dispersal. They assured me that the weapon would be used sparingly, though of course it should be used not at all. 

Most importantly, many of them, particularly individuals in the armed forces, said that they were alarmed by the tone that the rest of India was talking to Kashmiris in. One officer named a channel and an anchor, which I will not repeat but you likely know the individual being referred to. The officer said that the damage being caused by such sustained hostility was permanently damaging or had permanently damaged relations. 

Also, this is important, these are individuals in the government who are not Kashmiris who I was talking to. But being stationed there, they can better absorb and analyse what is going on. They said that the beef lynchings and random attacks on Kashmiri students had been noted by Kashmiri media and society. 

While the rest of us rejoice and celebrate the good fortune of Gujaratis, the Kashmiris are lamenting their misfortune and observing the total lack of sympathy (and indeed the unremitting hostility) that we have offered them.