The union government’s refusal to ban pellet guns is a classic case of what is inherently wrong with New Delhi’s policy towards Kashmir. Here is a so called non-lethal weapon which has so far blinded several hundred Kashmiris – most of them teenagers – but hasn’t been banned despite assurances to the contrary. On his second visit to the state, the home minister Rajnath Singh specifically indicated the government plan to do away with the pellet guns within “three to four days”. He said that the committee constituted to look for alternatives to pellet guns will soon present its report. But a few days later, the committee did submit the report, even proposing an alternative a less lethal weapon called PAVA shells, but it recommended no ban on the pellet guns, calling instead for their use in the “rarest of the rare” cases.
So, despite the assurances of no less than the home minister of India, the hoped-for ban on the pellet guns didn’t follow. Now, pellet guns are likely to be used with the PAVA shells in supposedly rarest of the rare cases. In a sense, this is an acknowledgement that the pellet guns so far have been used randomly and not always necessitated by the gravity of the situation as alleged by the security establishment. And this is why despite the explicit directions from the home minister that the use of pellets in crowd control should be avoided, the security forces have persisted with their use, justifying it as necessary under the circumstances. And the same justification can be peddled for their future use and the consequent injuries these inflict – that in all cases they were used in rarest of the rare occasion.
That said, the Government by refusing to ban the pellet guns has once again sent out a message that it will not do anything that will be construed as some kind of a concession in Kashmir. The outcome of the committee on pellet guns is that the Kashmiris will now be subject to not one but the two non-lethal weapons. The PAVA shells, however, are yet to tested. They might also turn out to be lethal in their impact.
What is more, the state government which should have been at the forefront of the campaign for a ban on the pellet guns, calls them “a modern method to deal with crowd, particularly agitating mobs who resort to heavy-stone pelting, rioting, arson, at the instigation of militants and separatists”. Defending the use of the pellet guns in the High Court, the Government also challenged the court’s jurisdiction in matters of what weapons to use or not use in crowd control. “Court cannot guide the law enforcing agencies to act in a particular way/manner. The court not being an expert agency does not recommend as to how the law and order situations are to be controlled,” the government response to the court read.
The bottomline is that the pellet guns will not go. They will continue to be used and not necessarily sparingly in practice. So, all the elaborate exercise of the review of the use of pellet guns has been entirely theoretical in nature. You assure an action, go through the elaborate motions to pretend to do it but end up doing nothing. This has been New Delhi’s policy towards Kashmir for the past 69 years. No wonder that there is no faith left in any new political initiative from New Delhi on Kashmir.
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