Blinding Force
The Centre clears the use of less lethal alternatives, but ‘pellet guns’ will not disappear
The Centre clears the use of less lethal alternatives but pellet guns are unlikely to go away in a hurry
Curious about the source of the commotion outside her village home in South Kashmir where angry youth were protesting Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani’s killing on July 8, Tamanna Ashiq was peering out of her window when a deadly hail of pellets from a 12 gaugepump-action shotgun fired by security personnel struck her. “Chances of this girl regaining normal sight are minimal,” an attending surgeon at the Shri Maharaja Hari Singh (SMHS) Hospital in Kaksarai, Srinagar, tells india today. “Her right retina is severely damaged by a pellet.”
The main public entrance to SMHS was closed three days after the Valley erupted in violent anger against Wani’s killing. This because the hospital administration, hugely burdened by the growing flood of casualties— men, women and children hit by pellets—from the unprecedented cycle of stone-pelting demonstrations, was forced to proclaim a medical emergency. The daily outpatient clinics were discontinued to make way for the critically injured.
“It’s a fate worse than death,” says the surgeon who first received the barely breathing schoolgirl at the SMHS trauma centre. “Worse than a single Kalashnikov bullet through the skull.” Her face, widely depicted in local Srinagar newspapers and later splashed on national TV channels to bring home the brutality of this latest cycle of strife in the Kashmir Valley, was pockmarked with searing red pellet injuries and bloodied eyelids sown tightly together. “Her face was like a sieve that had been used to filter blood,” the attending doctor, who requested anonymity, told india today at the SMHS Hospital on July 18.
Not that it is any consolation that the eight-year-old schoolgirl was more fortunate than 14-year-old Insha Mushtaq Lone. Hit by a lethal volley of pellet-fire in a disconcertingly identical replay of the fate that befell the younger girl, Insha too was watching a clash between protesting youth and security forces from the second-floor window of her father’s home in Sedow village in Shopian.
Unlike Tamanna, there is no hope that Insha will regain her vision. This, despite the best medical care that India has to offer. Moved to the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi after she was stabilised at SMHS, the verdict hasn’t changed: Insha will live but she will never be able to see again.
It is an unending story. Close to 600 protesting Kashmiri youth, including hapless women and child bystanders have sustained eye injuries through the ongoing protests in the Valley. While the majority of those hit will thankfully recover fully, there are five like Insha who will be forever blinded. Another 20 are reported to have lost vision in one eye.
Among those blinded by pellets is 12-year-old Omar Nazir, the schoolgoing son of Nazir Ahmad, a daily wage worker in Pulwama. There is also Firdous Ahmad Dar, 27, an autorickshaw driver from Baramulla, who was also sent back home from AIIMS with no hope of recovering his eyesight.
The Pava Alternative
After the 2010 unrest in which 110 protesters died, succumbing mostly to bullet injuries when security forces opened fire with Kalashnikovs, the Union home ministry rushed Ordnance Factory Board-made 12-gauge pumpaction shotguns to the Valley as standard crowd-control equipment. The shotguns, which fired number 9 lead
pellets or shot normally were used in competitive skeet shooting. The pellets lodged into human tissue without killing, and appeared to be a far better alternative to assault rifles.
Both the J&K police and the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) have since used these shotguns. In the new phase of violence, they have emerged as contentious objects even if they have been monikered ‘pellet guns’ suggesting a harmlessness associated with air rifles. It is not known whether the CRPF or the policemen, particularly the thousands of troopers rushed in from outside the Valley, were actually trained to use these shotguns.
Crowd control drills have not changed since the colonial era. Neither has the equipment or training. Policemen continue to be poorly trained in crowd-control techniques and are equipped with antiquated weaponry and equipment.
Former police officials decry the lack of discipline and training among security forces causing them to break ranks sometimes. “It’s like one mob attacking another,” says E.N. Rammohan, former DG, BSF.
On August 29, a seven-member committee of the home ministry, headed by joint secretary T.V.S.N. Prasad submitted a list of non-lethal alternatives to pellet guns to home secretary Rajiv Mehrishi. The committee, which included members from the CRPF, J&K police, BSF and the Ordnance Factory Board, was set up in July 26 and given two months to explore less lethal options. The committee’s two-month tenure, however, was truncated. The report was submitted in a month and just a week ahead of an all-party delegation led by home minister Rajnath Singh visited Kashmir. The report bases its guidelines on those issued to UN peacekeeping forces. It is yet to be made public but it lays out alternatives for the security forces (see graphic), particularly a crowd-busting synthetic pepper extract called PAVA or Pelargonic acid vanillylamide. The substance is believed to be more potent than CS or tear gas and affects the eyes temporarily, causing severe pain. PAVA, the report believes, will be the ideal substitute for ‘pellet guns’ and will be mass-produced in the BSF’s tear smoke facility at Tekanpur, Madhya Pradesh. Another option being suggested are capsaicin grenades which are, again, more potent than tear gas.
One home ministry official suggested that shotguns would now be used only in ‘the rarest of rare’ scenarios. Such optimism may be misplaced.
Officers at the apex of J&K’s security establishment insist that pumpaction shotguns employing cartridges containing No. 9 size pellets of lead are used the world over and can actually be among the “least lethal” means of crowd control where other means like tear gas and water cannons fail or cannot be deployed. This, they say, is contingent on the correct SOP (standard operating procedure) being strictly adhered to. “The problem,” says a senior state police officer, “is that the shotguns (pellet guns) are being deployed as a last resort by which time the crowd is much too close and well inside the recommended minimum distance of 50 metres. “At such close range, which oftentimes is just a few metres, even the No. 9 pellets can cause grievous harm or even be fatal as we have been witnessing,” he says.
In the wake of the furore over the unacceptable damage caused by the use of pellet guns to subdue unrest in the Valley, the J&K police did go back to the drawing board. After conducting a series of experiments using dummy targets, state police chief K. Rajendra’s office issued a set of new instructions-one, that rather than a last resort, pellet guns must be deployed alongside firing teargas shells to more actively discourage the protesting mob from closing in; and two, ensure that the pellets are fired from a distance no closer than 70 metres.
But as many security force
personnel engaged in crowd control in the valley will tell you, it is not always an ideal world out in the Kashmiri hinterland. “Teargas is an effective deterrent but often futile when the wind changes direction,” a senior CRPF officer points out, adding that none of the usual alternatives—tasers, chilli grenades or water cannons—are really capable of containing motivated mobs of Kashmiri youngsters. The stonethrowing this time around has been near-unprecedented and mobs of hundreds have rained down a furious barrage of stones on security personnel.
J&K police officers also reiterate that the pump action shotgun using No. 9 pellets is acknowledged as a ‘less lethal’ means of crowd control and employed by police forces including UN peacekeepers all over the world. The weapon and ammunition is also included for use in civil disturbances in the US. Expert shooters like the Hyderabad-based Shafath Ali Khan challenge this view saying that the pellets travel at a velocity of 1,400 feet per second and are lethal when they strike soft human tissue. “There are 400 pellets in one cartridge and they have a four-foot spread out of a gun barrel. Even at 40-45 metres, they can cause substantial damage,” he says.
K. Durga Prasad, director-general, CRPF, insists that his men “do not fire with intent (to injure)”. Security forces, particularly the CRPF, he says, have been employing a variety of means-gas grenades and shells, oleoresin grenades, plastic pellets and even empty cartridges (for noise)--to disperse protesting crowds.
“We have to contain the situation with the resources available to us on the ground,” Prasad says, denying that CRPF troopers have caused avoidable injuries and fatalities by failing to follow SOPs for pellet guns, including aiming below the waist. “The pellets do have a dispersal upon being fired,” he says, insisting, however, that the number of casualties would have been far higher had SOPs been ignored.
Although eye injuries are by far the starkest, pump-action shotguns and the pellets they spew wreak other equally horrific consequences. Doctors at the SMHS Hospital talk of Shafia Jan, a young mother who was hit in the abdomen in Arwani, a village some 50 km south of Srinagar. “Her guts had spilled out after pellets pierced and reopened scars from a caesarean section,” a doctor said. There are enough young men with a multitude of pellets permanently embedded too close to vital organs or the spinal chord. A young surgeon fires up his iPhone to show images of a young man from Srinagar’s Rainawari locality with the entire shotgun cartridge rooted inside what used to be his left eye.
Among the newest victims of the infernal ‘pellet guns’ are two young photo-journalists, Zuhaib Ahmad and Muzamil Matto, both caught in the crossfire during a stone-pelting demonstration in Rainawari on September 4, the day the all-party delegation was in Srinagar. The ‘pellet guns’ are unlikely to leave the Valley anytime soon.