“Authorities claim the pellet shotgun is not lethal, but the injuries and deaths caused by this cruel weapon bear testimony to how dangerous, inaccurate and indiscriminate it is. There is no proper way to use pellet-firing shotguns. It is irresponsible of authorities to continue the use of these shotguns despite being aware of the damage they do.”
-Amnesty International, Losing Sight in Kashmir: The Impact of Pellet-Firing Shotguns (2017)
In the recently released teaser for the upcoming action film Chauhaan, a masked Ajay Devgn casually dismisses the devastating human toll of these very weapons as mere "limited damage." It is a brutal, jarring departure from the particular way Hindi cinema has historically looked at Kashmir.
For decades, the camera has drifted over meadows, settled on a snow line, and followed two lovers running through Chinar trees turning gold. The valley has long been Bollywood's favorite backdrop, a place of shikaras, shawls, and songs.
In Jab Tak Hai Jaan, it is where love goes to be tested and healed. In Highway, it is where a runaway heroine finally breathes. Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani and Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani both borrow its light for a sequence or a song.
That was quiet arrangement Bollywood kept with Kashmir for half a century: the land and the landscape eulogised and emphasised, but the Kashmiri exists mostly like a furniture piece. Every so often, the industry decides to speak about Kashmir rather than merely film in it. That is usually when the trouble starts. Rare films like Haider may be exceptions.
To understand the upcoming Ajay Devgn-starrer Chauhaan (slated for October 2027), one must first look at the recent evolution of Bollywood's ideological lens. The cinematic Kashmiri has transformed from an innocent, hospitable host into a heavily weaponised caricature.
Bollywood’s Kashmir Trajectory
In films before the 1990s, Kashmir was showcased as the ‘paradise on earth’. Films like Kashmir Ki Kali (1964) cemented the valley as a pristine canvas for romance. Kashmiris were depicted as innocent, hospitable people whose lives revolved entirely around tourism and the hero's journey.
Post 2019, it started pivoting to nationalist themes. Uri: The Surgical Strike and PM Narendra Modi established a new, highly lucrative template: hyper-nationalist war narratives where the state is the unquestioned hero and complex geopolitics are flattened into absolute binaries.
The Kashmir Files released with massive state backing in 2022, officially replaced the "paradise" trope with a sensationalised framing of violence. Critics argue it distorted wounds to fit a majoritarian narrative, deepening communal divisions while profiting handsomely.
And that laid the edifice for the propaganda boom.
Releases like Article 370 in 2024, double down on reducing marginalised communities and human rights advocates into villains, functioning as extensions of government ideology.
Chauhaan takes the propaganda genre to a darker place. Instead of exaggerating conspiracies, it attempts to minimise and mock documented state violence against civilians. Directed by Neeraj Yadav, the teaser for Chauhaan opens not on romance, but on unrest. The state arrives as pure spectacle: Devgn, dressed in black with a skull mask covering his face, strides toward a mob of stone-pelting protesters.
In an act of profound, calculated humiliation, he pushes a boombox blaring the 90s hit "Jumma Chumma De De" - a brazen mockery of the Friday protests that historically defined Kashmir's unrest.
As the visuals play, Devgn's voice over exonerates the state before it is even accused: "Galati hamari nahi thi" (The fault wasn't ours). He complains that tear gas and water cannons were ineffective, before casually declaring that pellet guns caused only ‘limited damage.’
As he says this, the camera zooms into a protester’s bloodshot, pellet-torn eyes.
It is a single line, delivered with the swagger the action genre demands. But to anyone who has followed Kashmir over the last decade and a half, that phrase is not just historically inaccurate; it is an active erasure of human tragedy.
The Reality of ‘Limited Damage’
When the mass-market machinery of Bollywood reaches for the word "limited" to describe pellet guns, it glosses over one of the most traumatising chapters of the Kashmir conflict.
Introduced in 2010 as a supposedly "non-lethal" crowd-control measure, the weapon is actually a pump-action shotgun. According to the UK-based Omega Research Foundation, it is a hunting weapon that fires cartridges containing up to 500 tiny lead or iron balls, spraying indiscriminately at roughly 1,100 km/h.
Amnesty International has condemned the weapon as cruel and inaccurate, while the United Nations has rebuked India for grave violations, specifically regarding the blinding of children.
The numbers are staggering. Between 2010 and 2016, over 10,000 residents were struck. During just four months of unrest following the July 2016 killing of Burhan Wani, over 6,000 people were injured. The physical and psychological toll is devastating.
More than 1,000 Kashmiris suffered partial or total vision loss. An SKIMS Medical College study found that 78% of injured eyes suffered open-globe injuries - the most severe form of ocular trauma.
Behind these statistics are faces whose lives were permanently darkened by "limited damage":
Insha Mushtaq was fourteen when she opened a window to look at a protest and was blinded in both eyes. Hiba Nisar was just 19 months old, suffocating from tear gas inside her home, when a pellet ruptured her eye in her mother's arms.
The retinal detachments, the shattered corneas, the lead permanently lodged in skulls and chests, the pellet gun blindings caused are realities, not a matter of cinematic interpretation.
A Civilisational Dog-Whistle
The teaser carries other notes designed to incite. A voice declares that after seventy-five years, an "answer" is coming. Another line snarls, "Pathaanon se kehna, Chauhaan aa raha hai."
In a region where there is no actual "Pathan" community, the phrase functions as a nakedly communal dog-whistle. It reaches back into Agnikula Rajput mythology, framing the "Chauhaan" as a historical warrior born to fight demons, and pitting him against a generic, Muslim-coded antagonist. It is a manufactured civilisational clash designed to pit one religion against another, flattening a complex crisis into a simple binary for applause from majoritarian audiences.
Films are among the most powerful storytellers a society has. They shape how a viewer in Delhi or Dubai imagines a place they will never visit and people they will never meet. When those stories consistently render a population as a beautiful backdrop in the good times, and as a faceless, villainous mob in the bad times, they do a very specific kind of work on public memory.
By taking a horrific, documented reality, the blinding of over a thousand citizens, and rebranding it as heroic "limited damage," Chauhaan makes it easier for the nation to look away. The valley in the film will undoubtedly look magnificent. But whether the people who live in it will ever be allowed by Bollywood to be more than target practice is the question we are left holding.