Damage Control

The Centre clears the use of less lethal alternatives, but ‘pellet guns’ will not disappear

- Asit Jolly and Sandeep Unnithan

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 gauge pump 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.