“From Kashmir to protesting farmers, the use of so-called non-lethal weapons have killed and blinded people in defiance of constitutional guarantees and international standards”
The post-mortem report on the slain farmer, Shubhkaran Singh, confirming that he was killed by pellet injuries, is a direct indictment of the Haryana government and the police. It contradicts the latter’s denial of using rubber and pellet bullets during the farmers’ protest. The farmer’s tragic killing is emblematic, echoing numerous other farmers who suffered pellet wounds amid police attempts to disperse their march with excessive force, including drones-rained tear gas and pellet guns resulting in the blindness of at least three farmers. This disproportionate and brutal response is unjustifiable and morally reprehensible.
Unfortunately, there has not been much nationwide outrage over the use of such weapons which are peddled as ‘non-lethal’ but have the potential to kill, injure, maim and blind people in bulk. Kashmir, where pellet guns were first introduced in 2010, the same year that police and security forces egregiously violated Standard Operating Procedures by aiming tear-gas shells on the upper parts of the bodies of both street protestors and passersby, bears testimony to the epidemic of trauma and suffering that such barbaric methods of crowd control have caused. Yet, despite the limited opposition and criticism by human rights bodies and intellectuals, the use of such weapons continued.
The pellets were liberally used in 2016 when the Valley broke out in a massive outpouring of rage. According to one report, in 2016, 1,000 people sustained pellet injuries in the eye and according to SMHS hospital records 80 percent of them were less than 26 years old. About 30 of those injured were 15 years or less, including toddlers. Among the 44 suffering bilateral eye injuries, the eyes of 14 had to be completely eviscerated, leaving behind just two holes. British medical journal, The Lancet, maintained that between 2016 and 2018 about 1250 people had been blinded by pellets in the Valley. The statistic simply reduces human lives to a footnote. It does do not convey how teenagers and youngsters have lost their future, confidence and independence in the daily affairs of their life. It does not show how hundreds of children and teenagers were pushed to a life of darkness after their eyes were completely destroyed in such attacks.
The toll extends beyond statistics, encompassing shattered futures and lives plunged into darkness, yet there has been insufficient opposition, fostering a dangerous normalization of such tactics.
Lack of political and mass opposition to what happened in Kashmir, which has always been viewed in mainland India from an ultra-nationalistic perspective, has contributed to according the use of pellet guns and other so-called ‘non-lethal weapons’ as legitimate. Today, the arrogance of the government and the silence of the masses is equally responsible for extension of such brutal crowd-control methods, from Kashmir to rest of India. Last summer, the pellet guns were reported to have been tested in Manipur, another conflict-ridden zone that is treated as a periphery in the Indian national imagination. This was the first time that the pellet guns travelled out of Kashmir. This year, they were further extended closer to the country’s capital to stall the march of protesting farmers.
Such tactics not only violate the right to assembly guaranteed under the Indian constitution but also defy international norms. Contrary to international standards and examples like Britain’s abandonment of rubber pellets in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and the US retraction of rubber bullets after widespread outcry during the Black Lives Matter campaign, India persists in this oppressive practice. It is imperative for India to abandon these draconian methods. It must not deviate from global standards and must discontinue the use of these weapons that trample fundamental rights and humanitarian principles.
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