SRINAGAR: As a seventeen-year-old class 12 student, Umar’s life was a drill of studies along with menial jobs to support his family, but his aspirations were as high as the mountains that surround Srinagar, where he lives.
He read profusely when he wasn’t working and was optimistic of a successful career ahead.
He would stay up late in bed, under a light bulb, solving the equations while his younger siblings slept next to him, his mother reveals, recalling how she’d stand at the doorway and watch him quietly with both pride and expectation.
That was nine years ago. Then everything changed.
When Light Went Out
In July 2016, when he was with his friends on the road. The sun was blazing hot, everything bright and clear under its sizzling golden glow. They had no idea how quickly light could turn into shadow.
On July 8, Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani was killed, triggering massive protests and a security clampdown across Kashmir. Tensions were running high, with clashes erupting between protestors and security forces in many parts of the valley.
A day later, Umar stepped out with his friends in the downtown area of Srinagar. Like many others that day, the boys had gathered out of curiosity and restlessness, despite the volatile situation. The air was thick with uncertainty, slogans were echoing in the distance, broken by the occasional thud of tear gas or stun grenades.
They were still a short walk from their neighborhood when chaos unfolded. Security forces, attempting to disperse a crowd, opened fire with pellet guns. The pellets poured like a hurricane, splattering the street, metal cutting flesh and glass. The tiny metallic balls tore through the air, splattered across streets, walls—and bodies.
Two of them, small and almost invisible, slipped into Umar’s eyes.
He fell to the ground, fingers over his face, the world around him evaporating – turning into a blur. The pain wasn't corporeal—it was the kind that tore you in half from within. The kind that doesn't stop when the bleeding stops.
Almost nine years later, inside a dimly lit room in downtown Srinagar, with curtains drawn and a thin beam of light slipping through the crack, Umar sits hunched on the edge of his bed. The faint scent of medicinal balm hangs in the air.
His fingers fidget with the hem of his pheran, and every now and then, he pauses mid-sentence—as if unsure whether to say more or say nothing at all.
“I remember it like it was yesterday,” he says slowly, voice low. “It was just after Burhan Wani was killed - July 2016. The whole valley was burning. Srinagar's Downtown was boiling.” He taps his fingers against the wooden edge of the bed, filling the silences between his words.
“We were outside near Nowhatta. Just roaming… I don’t know, maybe to see what was happening. We heard slogans echoing from one lane to another. Some were pelting stones… some just watching. And then—” He stops.
His breath catches. “—then there was this sound… like chh chh chh… the pellets… they came flying. Nobody even got a chance to run.”
He leans back. “I didn’t even realise they had hit me till everything went dark. Like someone just switched off the world.”
"I don’t remember if I cried. I think I was just… numb. My friends were shouting, ‘Umar! Umar!’ but I couldn’t see them. I could only feel their hands on me, dragging me somewhere.”
As he recounts the moment, Umar occasionally falls silent, staring into a void with his sightless eyes.
Navigating Life Without Vision
Later, at the hospital, the doctor dropped a bombshell. He said there was nothing to be saved. Both the eyes were gone.
Both his eyes were severely damaged by a barrage of pellets fired by the security forces. His world—the books, the classroom, the mathematical problems, the faces of his family members—was gone in an instant. His dreams which he had nurtured through long nights and early mornings were shattered like shards of glass.
Umar went on, “I didn't speak for days…. I was shocked. Not when my mother cried alongside my bed.”
“My family was worried, it still is…. I’m fully blind. I had just slipped into a dark tunnel.”
It was in the days that followed that the real import of how his life would completely change forever would begin to dawn. The biggest blow to Umar was when he realized he would be unable to resume school.
When he speaks again, his voice is softer. “That day, I went blind. But I also lost everything else—school, books, even the faces of my family.”
Umar, who was one of the pellet victims, has had an artificial eye implanted. Still, he is totally blind.
Umar’s friend, who didn’t want to share his identity, reveals that he is now totally dependent on his family for even the simplest necessities, such as going to the washroom or moving from one position to another.
He remains confined to his room, at times hidden under a quilt, away from the world. “Whenever he wants to go out, he takes help from me,” the friend says.
Umar said, “I’m going through a very difficult time.” He shared that he is still undergoing treatment, which requires a lot of money—something that has become a major struggle for him and his family.
Over the past years, he is gradually learning to live with this realty. When asked what it means to be not able to see, he pauses for a long time and then says softly, “Yeh toh sirf Allah jaane. (Only God knows)”.
His friend chips in, “earlier, after the tragic incident, he was almost quiet for several years and restricted himself to a few sentences. Now, he speaks, ……. but he is not the same Umar that he was.”
Since 2016, Umar’s days have settled into a rhythm. Mornings start late. He doesn’t use an alarm. “Kya dekhna hai jo jaldi uthoon? (What is there to see for me to get up early),“ he says, with half a chuckle laced with both sarcasm and jest. There’s no tinge of bitterness in his words.
His younger brother helps him navigate around the house, though he insists on making his own tea. “Once I get the proportion of water right, everything else is manageable,” he says.
He visits the doctor only once every few months now, sometimes to specialists outside Kashmir, mostly when something flares up—pain, infection, headaches. In a matter-of-fact manner, he adds, “they can’t do much. Doctors have said that a surgery would be futile.”
Every Word is and Image
When asked how he spends his days, he smiles. He mostly listens to the radio. He is excited to talk about it. “I mostly listen to cricket commentary,” he says and passionately explains, “Commentary has everything - sound, emotions, images. For me every word is an image. I cannot see it, but I can feel it and sense it.”
He doesn’t call himself brave or claim to be strong. But he doesn’t complain either. When the conversation turns toward that day's afternoon, he just says, “that day came…… and my world vanished.”
Dreams Cut Short
Umar is not the only one whose dreams are shattered. Sana wanted to become a doctor – an ambition that came to an end the same year in mid-August when pitched battles between protestors hurling stones and gun-toting soldiers were raging on in the streets of Srinagar’s downtown where she lives.
Sana, a pellet survivor, says, "I was reading when suddenly I heard there were loud screams outside the house. My younger brother was present outside at that time. My mother instructed me to go out and call him inside. When I opened the gate of our house, security forces fired pellets at me."
My relatives brought me to the SMHS hospital following the mishap, and I was treated there. According to the doctors, I was unable to see anything from my left eye, but 30%-40% vision was recovered in my right eye.
"I had always dreamed of entering medical school. It was my heart's wish and dream. But then came this horrifying incident, and everything was transformed. I had to drop out. Now I am dependent on others for even the smallest things and am not able to move anywhere by myself,” she says.
“This accident did not strike me only physically but also completely shattered my spirit and future dreams," she adds.
"Whenever I try to concentrate on something, I suffer intensely due to eye pain. I have already undergone four operations in the SMHS Hospital, but there is no improvement. I even went for a check-up to Amritsar, and the physicians were of the same opinion.”
“Whatever I do, every day is a test,” she says, adding that the experience has been traumatic for the entire family. “My dream of becoming a doctor is shattering me and also my parents…… it will remain an unfulfilled dream,” she adds.
An Emotional and Economic Strain
Once a brilliant and ambitious student, Mehak's life similarly turned around the day she was caught in the violence and received a pellet injury in her eye in 2018.
The operations, the hospitalisation, and the relentless pain became her new routine. She has had four operations at SMHS Hospital, only to be given the same response—there's no solution.
Mehak is partially blind as the retina and optic nerve are severely impaired and cannot be fixed. She has some remaining eyesight in her other eye, which was operated on four times.
There has been a heavy emotional toll that she struggles with apart from the physical impact of the incident.
Mehak sits quietly in her small house in Srinagar, her voice trembling as she speaks. "I am now mentally very disturbed because of my pellet eye injury," she said, her eyes welling up with pain—not physical, but emotional as well. "I can't study anymore… I can't even work."
"My brother owns a small shop," she continues, sitting on the stairs inside her house, "and all the earnings he gets are used for my treatment. There's no money for anything else."
The accident didn't only impair her eyesight—it shattered her dreams, her peace of mind, and her family's economy.
She is aware that her vision will not be restored and that mentally disturbs her but she pins her hopes on “justice”.
“I didn’t get justice for what happened to me…… there will be one day,” she says, her words carrying her strength.
Widespread Use of Pellet Guns
On July 8, 2016, Burhan Wani, the Hizbul Mujahideen Commander, was killed by security forces in Kokernag, South Kashmir, triggering street protests across Kashmir, violent clashes between protestors and security forces amid curfews. Long curfews and anger swept over the Kashmir Valley.
As thousands of protesters descended on the roads, armed with stones flung at security forces, the latter used ruthless force to quell the protests including firing of pellet guns, blinding thousands of Kashmiri boys, girls, women, and children for the rest of their lives.
Pellet guns were introduced in Kashmir in 2010 as a "non-lethal" method of crowd control. Officials said they were used to break up demonstrations without causing much bodily harm. But on Srinagar's narrow streets and along the nervously stretched-out edges of the valley, the experience proved much more brutal leading to blinding, maiming and even deaths.
From 2016 to 2017, 17 individuals were killed with pellet guns, while more than 1,100 individuals were blinded partially or fully.
In July 2016 alone, 6,221 among 9,042 wounded that month had been injured with pellet guns, according to official data. Several cases have been well documented in news reports and academic papers.
What was initiated as a tool to silence the street outrage turned into an emblem of tragedy. Thousands of young boys and girls became casualties of the metal rain. Eyes were initially targeted. Hospitals were full of cases of shattered vision, permanent blindness, and distorted faces. The same weapons that were meant to save lives deformed them—permanently.
The government claimed that the weapons were required for maintaining "law and order."
However, the use of pellet guns was widely condemned within Kashmir, rest of India and internationally by rights groups, lawyers and doctors.
Both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International strongly condemned the use of pellet-firing shotguns by Indian security forces in Kashmir, calling for their immediate prohibition.
Human Rights Watch emphasized that these weapons cause "indiscriminate and excessive injury in violation of international standards," noting that pellets have caused thousands of injuries including widespread blindness over the past decade.
Amnesty International had similarly demanded a ban on pellet-firing shotguns, documenting 88 cases of people whose eyesight was damaged between 2014 and 2017. The organization described these weapons as "cruel," "dangerous," "inaccurate and indiscriminate," arguing that there is no proper way to use them for crowd control.
In 2014, the Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences conducted a study revealing that pellet gun injuries had led to serious fatalities. In 2016, the doctors at Srinagar’s Shri Maharaja Hari Singh (SHMS) Hospital came out to protest against use of pellet guns in the valley. Several doctors, including senior faculty members gathered at the college campus bandaged eyes for a symbolic protest against the indiscriminate use of pellet guns that became iconic.
Nine years hence, no doctors at the same hospital are now willing to even talk. A doctor, who spoke on conditions of anonymity, simply told the 'Kashmir Times' that they are not allowed to talk to journalists about the pellet gun issue.
According to data released by SMHS hospital in 2016, over 120 victims of eye injuries lost their vision due to pellet gun injuries in Srinagar from July to November 2016.
A research published by the National Library of Medicine included records from 777 patients diagnosed with pellet gun–related ocular injuries admitted to a tertiary hospital in Srinagar, India, between July and November 2016.
It found a very high percentage of almost permanent vision loss. Corrective therapies including surgeries performed could at best restore the vision only till counting fingers or worse in 82.4% of the cases.
(The identity of the reporter of this story has been withheld due to fear of potential reprisal. Names of pellet survivors have been changed to protect their identity.)
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