[Reader-list] Mirza Waheed: India’s crackdown in Kashmir: is this the world’s first mass blinding?

[Patrice Riemens]

original to: 
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/08/india-crackdown-in-kashmir-is-this-worlds-first-mass-blinding


  India’s crackdown in Kashmir: is this the world’s first mass blinding?

A bloody summer of protest in Kashmir has been met with a ruthless 
response from Indian security forces, who fired hundreds of thousands of 
metal pellets into crowds of civilians, leaving hundreds blinded.

by Mirza Waheed

Tuesday 8 November 2016

For the past month, while the attention of the world has been fixed on 
every dramatic twist in the US presidential election, the renewal of 
armed conflict between India and Pakistan has barely touched the 
headlines. In the past few weeks, the two nuclear states have, between 
them, killed two dozen civilians and injured scores of others in 
exchanges of artillery fire across the disputed border – known as the 
“line of control” – that divides Kashmir into parts controlled by India 
and Pakistan.

The latest flare-up in the long-running war of attrition between the two 
countries comes on the heels of a bloody summer of protest and 
repression in Kashmir that has now been erased from memory by the 
banging of war drums in Delhi and Islamabad. Since July, when the 
killing of a young militant leader sparked a furious civilian uprising 
across the Kashmir valley, the Indian state has responded with singular 
ruthlessness, killing more than 90 people. Most shocking of all has been 
the breaking up of demonstrations with “non-lethal” pellet ammunition, 
which has blinded hundreds of Kashmiri civilians.

In four months, 17,000 adults and children have been injured, nearly 
five thousand have been arrested, and an entire population spent the 
summer under the longest curfew in the history of curfews in Kashmir.

All this has been quickly forgotten in the past two months. On 18 
September, a small group of jihadi fighters, widely believed to have 
come from Pakistan, staged a commando raid on an Indian army camp near 
the northern Kashmir town of Uri, killing 19 Indian soldiers – the 
deadliest attack on Indian security forces in Kashmir in two decades. 
Indian politicians quickly blamed Pakistan, which the country’s home 
minister described as a “terrorist state”, while Pakistani leaders made 
the implausible claim that India had staged the attack itself to 
distract from the protests in Kashmir.

The Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, who came into office promising 
to take a harder line with Pakistan, announced that “those behind this 
despicable attack will not go unpunished”. At the end of September, 
India retaliated with what it called a “surgical strike” against alleged 
militant camps in Pakistan-controlled territory, which, according to an 
army statement, “caused significant damage to terrorists”. Pakistan 
denied the attack ever took place – claiming that there had been nothing 
more than the usual exchange of fire across the border. Meanwhile, an 
ugly war of words continued to escalate in TV news studios, some of 
which were refurbished as pop-up war rooms.

Since then, the relationship between the two countries, which is at the 
best of times characterised by varying degrees of hate – depending upon 
the political temperature in Kashmir – has soured to the point where 
both are now suddenly finding spies in each others’ diplomatic missions. 
A tit-for-tat nearly every day, on TV, on social media, in ambassadorial 
corps – even in the realm of culture, where India has effectively banned 
Pakistani actors from working in Bollywood, and Pakistan has banned the 
screening of Indian films in cinemas. According to recent reports, 
civilians caught in the crossfire have been evacuated, hundreds of 
schools shut, and local residents pressed into service to ferry supplies 
to troops stationed high in the Himalayas. As always, the victims of the 
artillery duels have been the civilians living on either side of a 
border that did not exist until the middle of the 20th century.

In the war of words that has followed the bloodshed in Uri, the brutal 
oppression of protest in Kashmir has been largely ignored. Indeed, the 
Indian state, aided by a near-militaristic TV news media, has used the 
Uri attack and its aftermath to cover up a surge of killings, maimings 
and blindings in one of the longest-running conflicts in the world. This 
is the story of the bloody summer that Kashmiris have endured – and of 
why they will not forget it.

On 8 July, a militant rebel leader, Burhan Wani, was shot dead by Indian 
armed forces and police in a remote Kashmir village. The killing sparked 
a series of spontaneous demonstrations and protests, which, in a matter 
of days, turned into a reinvigorated popular revolt against India’s 
dominion over this disputed state.
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Wani’s path to militancy began in another one of Kashmir’s bloody 
summers – back in 2010, when Indian security forces killed 120 
protesters. Wani, who was then 15 years old, is said to have joined a 
small group of homegrown militants after he and his brother were 
humiliated and abused by Indian soldiers. Over the next few years, he 
became Kashmir’s most famous militant commander, and acquired something 
of a cult following among young Kashmiris, who saw him as a symbol of 
resistance against Indian occupation. Wani was a new breed of militant: 
unlike the first generation of Kashmir separatist fighters in the early 
1990s, he did not cross over into Pakistan; he didn’t use a nom de 
guerre, and he amassed a huge following on social media, where he issued 
brazen challenges to the Indian state. It was therefore no surprise that 
thousands attended Wani’s funeral in his hometown of Tral – or that 
those who could not get there organised their own funeral services 
across the Kashmir valley.

As Kashmiris took to the streets, police and paramilitaries were 
deployed in large numbers across the region. Thousands of young 
protesters charged at the armed forces with stones and slogans demanding 
freedom. Indian forces responded with lethal effect, firing bullets, CS 
gas, and metal pellets into the crowds. In less than four days, nearly 
50 people were killed and thousands injured. More people took to the 
streets to protest against these killings, and the Indian forces and 
Kashmiri police killed and injured more of them. A cycle of protests 
connected to the funerals of those protesters were, in turn, fired upon, 
resulting in yet more killings and blindings. By the end of July, India 
was faced with a full-scale popular revolt in Kashmir.

The most recent figures put the number of dead at 94, including a young 
Kashmiri academic who was battered to death by Indian soldiers, and an 
11-year-old boy, whose body, riddled with hundreds of pellets, was found 
on the outskirts of Srinagar, the joint capital of Kashmir, in 
mid-September. Shockingly, more than 500 people, most of them young, 
were shot in the face with the pump-action “pellet guns” that the Indian 
forces routinely use to suppress protests. These weapons discharge 
hundreds of small metal pellets, or birdshot, capable of piercing the 
eye.

As the uprising continued, the armed forces, by their own admission, 
fired nearly 4,000 cartridges at stone-throwing demonstrators, crowds 
protesting against police brutality, and even onlookers. This means that 
they sent, by one recent estimate, 1.3m metal balls hurtling towards 
public gatherings predominantly made up of young unarmed people.

Children as young as four and five now have multiple pellets in their 
retinas, blinding them partially, or fully, for life. At the start of 
September, doctors at Kashmir’s main hospital reported that on average, 
one person had their eyes ruptured by pellets every other hour since 9 
July. “It means 12 eye surgeries per day,” one doctor told a local 
newspaper. “It is shocking.”

On 12 July, the fourth day of the protests, the state government, which 
is run by a controversial coalition between Modi’s Hindu nationalist 
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and a local ally, the People’s Democratic 
Party (PDP), finally issued its first official statement on the use of 
the so-called “non-lethal” pellet guns. A spokesperson for the 
government, representing the PDP, described its position to the media: 
“We disapprove of it … But we will have to persist with this necessary 
evil till we find a non-lethal alternative.”

     There is no recorded instance of a modern democracy systematically 
and willfully shooting at people to blind them

At first, the statement appeared as a typical soundbite, the sort of 
thing that officials must compose and recite with studied ambiguity for 
the press – the “government version”, as its known. But I was struck by 
its cavalier defence of state violence and brutalisation. It was obvious 
that this was not the spokesman’s personal view; it was a clear 
articulation of the intent of the Indian state in Kashmir: we have no 
choice but to shoot people in the eyes.

This was an unprecedented expression of state violence. There is no 
other recorded instance of a modern democracy systematically and 
wilfully shooting at people to blind them. At the end of August, 
according to data obtained by one of India’s national newspapers, nearly 
6,000 civilians had been injured, and at least 972 of them had suffered 
injuries to their eyes.

According to official records at SMHS, the main hospital in Srinagar, 
570 people sought treatment after their eyeballs were ruptured by metal 
pellets. Ophthalmologists at the hospital performed more surgeries in 
three days – from 10 to 12 July – than they had in the past three years. 
Many of the wounded were protesters, but not all. Not one of them 
deserved to be robbed of their sight.

By 14 August, as India prepared to celebrate its Independence Day, 
Kashmir was under a near total blackout. I briefly lost touch with my 
parents, as the state cut off all telephones and the internet. I was 
reminded, once again, of the lines of the late Kashmiri-American poet 
Agha Shahid Ali, which still echo 20 years after he wrote them: “The 
city from where no news can come / is now so visible in its curfewed 
night / that the worst is precise.” Just before the shutdown, I had 
talked to my youngest sister over WhatsApp – she was a little girl in 
the 90s, when Kashmir witnessed the first rebellion against Indian rule. 
“I’d never imagined my [three-year-old] child would see everything that 
I saw as a child,” she told me.

Rebellion against India’s rule over Kashmir is neither new nor 
surprising – and the brutality of the state’s response is equally 
familiar. In the 1990s, India came down hard on a widespread uprising in 
the Kashmir valley – killing, torturing, disappearing, and imprisoning 
thousands. Some estimates put the number of people killed since 1989 at 
70,000. Some 8,000 non-combatants are thought to have been disappeared, 
and 6,000 are believed to have been buried in mass graves. Human rights 
reports have identified thousands of cases of torture, including 
shocking techniques such as “simulated drowning, striping flesh with 
razor blades and piping petrol into anuses”. According to a 2012 report 
in the Guardian, government documents revealed that one group of 
security agents had “lopped off the limbs of suspects and fed prisoners 
with their own flesh”.

     In southern Kashmir, four girls, aged between 13 and 18, were shot 
in their faces as recently as last week

Years later, very little has changed in the Indian state’s response to 
the demand for self-determination from the people of Kashmir. In a 
matter of four to five weeks this summer, Indian troops, with a clear 
mandate to be unsparing, wounded over 10,000 people. One of the youngest 
– five-year old Zohra – was admitted to a hospital in Srinagar with 
lacerations to her abdomen and legs. Fourteen-year-old Insha was in the 
family kitchen when a swarm of pellets pierced her face. She has lost 
vision in both eyes. In southern Kashmir, four girls, aged between 13 
and 18, were shot in their faces last week. The prognosis for the 
youngest of these, 13-year-old Ifra Jan, “is not good”, a doctor said. 
It is doubtful that these little girls posed a threat to the military 
force – estimated at 700,000 soldiers and police – stationed in Kashmir.

As the showers of metal pellets were unleashed upon protesters, 
bystanders and homebound schoolchildren, hospitals in Kashmir began to 
resemble scenes from the great wars of the 20th century. Rows of beds 
with blindfolded boys and girls on them, parents waiting anxiously, 
doctors and paramedics in attendance around the clock. On occasion, 
police and spies also infiltrated the wards to compile profiles of the 
injured, in order to place them under surveillance after their release. 
The wounded were brought in by the dozen, like birds in the hunting 
season.

All of this was incomprehensible, even to longtime observers of violence 
in Kashmir. One of the largest military forces on the planet could not 
be waging a war against seeing. Perhaps a few aberrations, a 
crowd-control tactic gone woefully wrong – one hoped so, but the numbers 
kept piling up, eye after mutilated eye popping up on the screens of 
phones and computers, as journalists began to publish their reports.

As none of the powerful men who run Kashmir from Delhi expressed qualms 
about the blinding of children, it became clear that in its hubris the 
Indian state had decided that snatching vision from a few hundred young 
people was a fair price to pay for keeping Kashmir in check. Perhaps 
itself blinded by a strain of arrogance peculiar to occupying powers, it 
continued to pummel a subject population into submission.

The phrase Raqs-e-Bismil, used in mystic Persian poetry to denote the 
passion of the devoted, translates as the “dance of the wounded”. In the 
slaughterhouse of the Kashmir valley, even the grievously injured – with 
pellet-scarred eyes or broken limbs – have remained defiant. “We have 
even got some patients whose guts are perforated and they are asking 
when they can go back and join the protests,” one doctor reported.

Two-and-a-half decades of rebellion in Kashmir have hardened the 
indifference of India’s political and intellectual classes to the human 
cost of the country’s repressive tactics in the valley. Amid rising 
nationalist fervour, any sense of the basic rights of a suffering 
population has been eroded or vanished entirely. The hostility now 
appears to be total, unbridgeable, and for those on the receiving end, 
unbearable. Powerful TV studios urge the state to be more aggressively 
macho, while actively suppressing or distorting news from Kashmir. One 
prominent newspaper ran an online poll about the continued use of the 
pellets that had wounded and blinded so many Kashmiris – a clear 
majority voted in support. Eminent columnists speak calmly of the need 
for “harsh love” toward civilian protesters to rationalise the state’s 
ruthless response. And the Twitter account for a government initiative, 
Digital India, posted a poem calling for the army to murder Kashmiris 
until they surrender.

As images from Kashmir began to circulate on the internet – despite 
frequent attempts to block communications, including at least one 
midnight raid on the offices of a local newspaper, and a blanket ban on 
one English daily, the Kashmir Reader – pictures of the wounded emerged 
by the dozen, many of them looking as though they had ruptured fruits 
where their eyes should have been. On the second day of the protests, 
more than 50 people were admitted to the main hospital in Srinagar. 
Medics and parents were desperate to save vision in at least one eye for 
those who had been shot, attempting to extract the jagged and irregular 
pellets. “This only happens in a war-like situation,” a surgeon sent 
from Delhi later said.
A Kashmiri protester who was shot by Indian security forces in Srinagar, 
in July 2016.
A Kashmiri protester who was shot by Indian security forces in Srinagar, 
in July 2016. Photograph: Tauseef Mustafa/AFP/Getty Images

The protocol for the use of these crowd control weapons is to aim at the 
legs to disperse demonstrators. But it seems that the paramilitaries and 
the police have been deliberately firing into faces. Some may only have 
minor wounds, some will suffer limited loss of vision, some will lose 
one eye, some both, and some will be impaired for life, but the pitiless 
assault on protesting adolescents forces us to ask one question: is the 
Indian state happy to blind a generation?

It is inconceivable that policy mandarins in Delhi or their advisers in 
Kashmir could be unaware of the destructive power of “non-lethal 
weapons”. Earlier this year, the International Network of Civil 
Liberties Organisations and Physicians for Human Rights published a 
report titled “Lethal in Disguise”. “Pellet rounds”, it stated, “cause 
an indiscriminate spray of ammunition that spreads widely and cannot be 
aimed ...” They, therefore, “are not only likely to be lethal at close 
range, but are likely to be inaccurate and indiscriminate at longer 
ranges, even those recommended by manufacturers for safety”.

Many countries have banned police from using ammunition meant for 
hunting animals. The multidirectional spray of pellets was designed to 
catch prey in flight. But many countries have continued to use them as a 
means of force to control civilian demonstrators.

In Israel, security forces often deploy lethal and “non-lethal” 
ammunition against Palestinian protesters, and crowd-control weapons 
have blinded at least five young Palestinians in the last two years. The 
use of rubber bullets by police was banned in the Spanish region of 
Catalonia in 2014, after at least seven people were blinded by them on 
the streets of Barcelona.

In 2011, months after the uprising in Tahrir Square that toppled an 
Egyptian dictator, a young police lieutenant, Mohamed el-Shenawy, became 
infamous for firing pellets into the eyes of protesters against Egypt’s 
military government. His exemplary skill at blinding civilians earned 
him the nickname the “Eye Sniper”, and his notoriety as a symbol of 
ongoing state brutality eventually led to a three-year jail sentence.

Will India prosecute its own eye snipers? Or outlaw the use of these 
weapons?

In the country’s present hypernationalist mood, every kind of other is a 
suspicious figure, a ready-made scapegoat for any failure that befalls 
the politicians determined to make India great again: the secessionist 
Kashmiri, the impure Dalit, the traitorous beef-eating Muslim, the woman 
who speaks her mind, the anti-national journalist, the dissenting 
writer. Any voices who might call for a ban on these “non-lethal” guns 
are certain to be ignored. To the contrary, ministers and police, and 
their demagogues and cheerleaders, have continued to advocate the use of 
both pellets and bullets against protesting crowds in Kashmir: unruly 
cattle must be reined in at any cost.

Because Kashmiris have become accustomed to the violence inflicted on 
them – as they are to the indifference of the world – when pellets were 
first sprayed at protesters in the heated summer of 2010, most people 
processed this as nothing more than a new misfortune; just another 
element of the war in Kashmir. If one were to draw a diagram of the 
assaults inflicted on Kashmiri bodies over the decades, hardly a single 
part would remain unmarked: in the 1990s, when the violence was at its 
worst, the eyes were spared; now they seem to have become a favourite 
target. The victims of such tactics, consciously and not, cultivate 
reserves of tolerance for pain, but also a capacity to remember.

I remember, too. I grew up amid the darkness of the late 80s and early 
90s. I remember that most of us teenagers innately understood that being 
abused, slapped, or beaten with batons and rifle butts by an Indian 
trooper was a bit of a joke when compared to the horrors that others 
endured in the dungeons of Kashmir. (One of the most notorious torture 
centres, Papa II – a colonial-era building on the banks of Dal Lake in 
Srinagar – was refurbished and redecorated, and served as the stately 
residence of the late pro-India politician Mufti Mohammad Sayeed. His 
daughter, as the current chief minister, now presides over the 
brutalisation of another generation of Kashmiri youth.)

I remember that the war in those years taught us to treat corpses and 
shrouds as reminders of passing time, which was measured for the young 
in massacres and assassinations. I recall, too, the tragic rupture in 
the Kashmiri body politic when an atmosphere of fear and loathing forced 
out the Kashmiri Pandits – a Hindu minority that had cohabited with 
Muslim Kashmiris for centuries – in an almost overnight exodus, many of 
them targeted and killed by separatist militants. Sanjay Tickoo, who 
runs an organisation for the welfare of Kashmiri Hindus, says: “Over the 
past 20 years, we estimate that 650 Pandits were killed in the valley.” 
I don’t know what happened to Sunil and Rajesh, my childhood mates from 
the primary school we all attended near an idyllic river bend in Verinag 
in south Kashmir.

Growing up, I experienced a brutal, bleak time, as India’s response to 
the uprising included the grotesque policy of “catch and kill”, under 
which combatants and non-combatants alike were dispatched in summary 
executions or tortured to death. And yet, I don’t remember such a 
vengeful assault on ordinary people as we are seeing now. Buoyed by a 
belligerent nationalist at the helm in Delhi, the security forces on the 
ground perhaps feel emboldened to unleash a more widespread cruelty.

In 2013, an affecting photo essay by journalist Zahid Rafiq in the New 
York Times documented a few of the stories of those who had been blinded 
by pellets. It remains a grim testament to the darkness in Kashmir – 
even though the blindings at that time, amid hundreds dead, did not 
attract too much notice. At the time, hardly any Indian civil society 
group or human rights organisation thought fit to speak up about such a 
wicked crime. The wanton demonisation of the Kashmiri Muslim, a project 
that some media organisations in India take particular pleasure in, was 
perhaps fully realised even then. It certainly is now, when thousands, 
fed on a daily diet of nationalist fury, take to social media to 
celebrate the killing, maiming, and blinding of young Kashmiris.

That the government in Kashmir – a collection of local elites comprising 
career politicians, technocrats, and chancers loyal to India – considers 
pellet guns a “necessary evil”, might make us feel grateful. At least 
they acknowledge the “evil” part – perhaps to address their own guilty 
consciences.

A few days into this summer’s uprising, the Kashmir Observer, a local 
English-language daily, reported that the local government had deployed 
a fleet of brand new ambulances to securely ferry visiting VIPs to 
picnic spots in the valley. This was while protesters were being killed, 
maimed and blinded – and while the ambulances carrying them to hospitals 
were coming under fire from security forces.

An ophthalmologist at the main hospital in Kashmir told the Indian 
Express in July: “For the first time the foreign bodies are irregular 
edged, which causes more damage once it strikes the eye.” Irregular, 
sharp edges? I had assumed that the pellets fired at protesters – like 
rubber or plastic bullets, were round discoid things. It turns out that 
there exist different kinds of pellets, and in 2016, some Indian forces 
are using the jagged variety – which inflict greater damage to flesh and 
eyes alike, and which doctors say is far more difficult to remove.

How did India get here? How is it all right for a constitutionally 
democratic and secular, modern nation to blind scores of civilians in a 
region it controls? Not an authoritarian state, not a crackpot 
dictatorship, not a rogue nation or warlord outside of legal and ethical 
commitments to international statutes, but a democratic country, a 
member of the comity of nations. How are India’s leaders, thinkers and 
its thundering televised custodians of public and private morality, all 
untroubled by the sight of a child whose heart has been penetrated by 
metal pellets? This is the kind of cruelty we expect from Assad’s Syria, 
not the world’s largest democracy.

Historically, such an inhuman response to an uprising – to mass dissent 
– has been the province of empires and tyrants. A modern democratic 
nation rarely unleashes such violence, except upon victims whom it does 
not regard as its own people. It is quite clear that for India and its 
rulers, Kashmiris have been subjects and not citizens for as long as 
Kashmiris have refused Indian rule. You do not shower projectiles that 
target eyes and viscera on a people you consider your own. In snatching 
away the vision of Kashmiri children, the Indian state has decisively 
announced that it has only one message: you must be servile and 
submissive, and if you refuse, we will unleash our fury.

With a hubris derived from its might and military dominion over Kashmir, 
the state convinces itself that it has the power to inflict blindness. 
In no time, then, it blinds itself too – to the character of democracy 
that is its central founding principle. The harsh repression of Kashmiri 
protests, the Nobel prize-winning Indian economist Amartya Sen declared 
in July, is “the biggest blot on India’s democracy”.

It is hard not to see this mood of brutality connected, at the very 
least in its tenor, to the larger register of extreme violence, by both 
state and non-state actors, that has come to be normalised over the last 
couple of decades.

There has been some dissent in India. Journalists, activists, even some 
politicians, have written elegiac columns and essays on the savage 
response to the rebellion in Kashmir. They have implored their 
government to cease the brutality, to be kind, and to talk to Kashmiris. 
But it appears that the Indian government, clouded by a newfound 
chauvinism and a hunger for votes, is in no mood to listen to the 
nation’s voices of sanity. In August, only a few days after Indian 
forces in Srinagar murdered a 21-year-old cash-machine watchman by 
firing 300 pellets into his body from close range, the Indian prime 
minister used a speech on Kashmir to taunt Pakistan over its own 
atrocities against separatists in the province of Balochistan, where the 
Pakistani army has inflicted forced disappearances and summary 
executions on the Baloch people. “Pakistan forgets that it bombs its own 
citizens using fighter planes,” he said. But Modi chose to forget that 
his own forces had, by then, killed scores of young Kashmiris.

We need to interrogate the circumstances that have led to the deliberate 
blinding of hundreds of young people at the hands of armed forces in 
Kashmir, before this too is forgotten. As some of the wounded have begun 
to heal, some accounts have suggested that the damage may have been less 
severe than initially feared – that perhaps many of those who underwent 
eye surgery will regain “some vision” in at least one eye. This might 
make one feel better – relieved that its not worse – but there is 
something wrong with that kind of moral reckoning, akin to the Indian 
security officials who continue to maintain that pellet guns must be 
used because the alternative would be worse. One security official told 
an Indian news website that pellet guns had actually “saved lives”: “It 
is unfortunate that there have been eye injuries but the pellets are 
less lethal than getting hit by bullets.”

So we might ask: what if the armed forces stationed in Kashmir had fired 
live bullets instead? Imagine the death toll! But this doesn’t compute: 
in 2016, the security forces have already killed nearly 100 civilians. 
Is that an acceptable number?

In a year or two, as India, and Pakistan, continue to harp on their 
territorialist positions, there will arrive a season of surface calm – a 
“return to normalcy” – in Kashmir. People will shop, marry off their 
children, and celebrate an uncurfewed Eid. They will also welcome 
tourists in their blighted land.

But when this new generation of freedom-seekers grows up into blinded, 
maimed, adulthood, they will carry our guilt-ridden consciences for us. 
They will remember more than they have seen. They will certainly 
remember the country that did this to them.

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