The pellet shotgun

The number

The source matters. This is not an estimate by a campaigning organisation. It is the caseload of the hospital in Srinagar where the pellet-injured are taken, reported through a United Nations report. It counts people blinded — not people hit, not people injured. The number hit is far larger.

The weapon

OHCHR describes it plainly: the 12-gauge pump-action shotgun firing metal pellets is “one of the most dangerous weapons used in Kashmir.”^[1]

The reason it blinds is intrinsic to how it works. A single cartridge disperses hundreds of small metal pellets in a widening cone. The shooter cannot control which part of which person the pellets strike, and cannot avoid striking people who were not the target. The eye is the one part of the body that a low-energy metal fragment can destroy outright. A weapon that sprays hundreds of uncontrollable projectiles into a crowd at head height is not a precision instrument that occasionally goes wrong; blinding is its predictable output.

Because they are classed as non-lethal, pellet guns are used in situations where firearms would not be — against protests and crowds, at close range. The classification widened the circumstances of use, and the injuries followed.

Deployment and the record

Pellet shotguns came into widespread use in 2010 and were used at scale after 8 July 2016, when the killing of the militant commander Burhan Wani triggered the largest uprising in years. OHCHR recorded in July 2019 that Indian security forces continue to use them in the Kashmir Valley as a crowd-control weapon “despite concerns as to excessive use of force and the large number of incidental civilian deaths and injuries that have resulted.”^[1]

The word doing the work in that sentence is continue. The injuries were known, they were documented, they were raised by the United Nations — and the weapon stayed in service.

Among the blinded were children. The best-known case is that of a teenage schoolgirl, Insha Mushtaq, struck in the face by pellets at her home in 2016 and permanently blinded in both eyes. She was fourteen.

What accountability followed

OHCHR’s finding on investigations, in the same report, covers this weapon along with everything else: no information about any new investigation into excessive use of force leading to casualties; no prosecutions reported; and no indication that security forces had been asked to re-evaluate or change their crowd-control techniques or rules of engagement.^[2]

Twelve hundred and fifty-three people lost their sight, and the documented institutional response was not to review the rules of engagement.

Why this file matters to the argument

Killings can be contested. The state can say a person was a combatant, or was caught in crossfire, or was killed by militants — and with no independent investigation permitted, the dispute cannot be resolved. That is what the fourfold gap between the two casualty counts is made of. File 01 →

Blindings are different. The injured are alive, they are in a hospital register, and the weapon that produced the injury is identifiable from the wound. There is no version of these events in which 1,253 people blinded themselves. It is the least deniable entry in this dossier, which is why it belongs near the front of any argument.