‘Limited damage’: Upcoming Bollywood film angers Kashmir pellet gun victims
Makers of Chauhaan, an ‘action entertainer’, accused of mocking more than 1,000 Kashmiris partially or completely blinded by pellet shotguns. Feroz Aslam* sports an abashed
Makers of Chauhaan, an ‘action entertainer’, accused of mocking more than 1,000 Kashmiris partially or completely blinded by pellet shotguns. Feroz Aslam* sports an abashed smile whenever he hears the clink of a teacup on a saucer. He cannot see, but he knows it is his father. “For the past 10 years, it has been my parents – ailing themselves – who have been serving me food,” the 28-year-old told Al Jazeera. “Being their eldest son, it embarrasses me extremely.” Aslam was not born blind. He lost his vision a decade ago when, while running an errand to a fruit shop in Sopore, a town in Indian-administered Kashmir, he was hit by a rushing stream of shotgun pellets fired by Indian security forces during an antigovernment protest. Aslam remembers falling onto the ground as the hot projectiles seared into his skin. “Seven pellets went into my right eye and six into the left,” he said, adding, “and more than 300 hit my chest.” Upon being fired, pellet guns release hundreds of tiny iron balls that tear into the flesh and stay buried deep inside the tissues, from where it is nearly impossible to remove them. The pellets burned through Aslam’s cornea – the glazed coating that protects the eye’s sensitive parts – impairing his vision forever. ‘Blood-soaked eyes’ Aslam is among more than 1,000 Kashmiris who have lost their vision, partially or completely, since New Delhi introduced pellet guns in 2010 to quell street protests in the disputed Muslim-majority region, controlled by India and Pakistan in parts and claimed by both in full. Now, teasers of a Bollywood film, scheduled for an October 2027 release, have reopened those wounds in Kashmir. Chauhaan features actor Ajay Devgn playing an Indian security official, who is arrayed against hundreds of stone-throwing protesters in Kashmir amid burning cars and pitched street battles. Devgn’s voice in the background appears to mock the past Indian governments for having “pandered to the enemy” by refusing to be tougher on the protesters. It laments the alleged ineffectiveness of security measures deployed by Indian forces. A mask to stay safe during a tear gas attack can be bought online, it says, while a pellet gun only inflicts “limited damage”. The trailer of the “action entertainer” ends with Devgn, wearing a skull mask and walking towards a protesting crowd with a wheeled boombox blaring “Jumma chumma de de” – a popular film song from the 1990s, in which a lover is demanding his betrothed to meet him on a Friday so they can kiss.
Most street protests against India’s rule in Kashmir used to take place on Fridays. Aslam cannot watch Chauhaan’s teaser, but he calls the upcoming film unfortunate. “If the makers blindfold their eyes only for a day, they would know what it feels like not being able to see,” he told Al Jazeera. India’s use of pellet guns in Kashmir crescendoed in 2016 when huge rallies were held during protests against the killing of Burhan Wani, a 22-year-old rebel commander of the regional armed group Hizbul Mujahideen. Wani was shot dead along with two other rebels on July 8, 2016, by Indian security forces and police in Anantnag district’s Bundoora village, about 85km (53 miles) from the region’s main city of Srinagar. Wani’s killing threw the valley into weeks of mourning and angry protests, resulting in the deaths of dozens of people and the blinding of hundreds of others, including women and children, some as young as 18 months. Or, 14-year-old Insha Mushtaq, whose face was so badly disfigured by the pellets that it took plastic surgeons weeks to stitch it back together. An estimated 14 percent of Kashmir’s pellet victims are children below the age of 15. Saiba Varma, a medical anthropologist at the University of California San Diego whose work focuses on Kashmir, argues that Chauhaan’s political messaging signals how Indian public discourse has grown “increasingly pernicious as well as less heedful of the questions of morality surrounding the police excesses” in Kashmir. “When pellet guns were first introduced as a crowd control measure, the state justified them as a more humanitarian, less lethal alternative to bullets. The use of pellet guns was meant to shore up the state as a humanitarian actor,” she told Al Jazeera. “But now those narratives appear to have fallen away. The state no longer even needs these justifications.” Varma said the depictions of Kashmiri pellet victims in the film’s trailer were laced with popular political tropes about the Kashmiri people. “The images of men with blood-soaked eyes voicing animalistic screams reinforce the tropes of Kashmiris as dangerous figures that require taming,” she said. ‘Bleeding through my eyes’ India’s use of pellet guns in Kashmir has attracted widespread condemnation from rights groups and even the United Nations, which accused India of “grave violations” against children. “I call upon the government to take preventive measures to protect children, including by ending the use of pellets against children, ensuring that children are not associated in any way with security forces, and endorsing the Safe Schools Declaration and the Vancouver Principles,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a report in 2021.
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