By Aakar Patel
The teaser for Chauhaan – the latest in the line of movies selling majoritarian propaganda – is out. It opens in the sort of place the Indian government prefers its stories set – a street in Pulwama, stones in the air, security forces in formation. The voiceover calls tear gas ineffective because protection masks are easily accessible online.
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Water cannons are called temporary solutions. What is required, the movie insinuates, is something harsher: 12-gauge shotguns firing birdshot into crowds. We should pause here. Narrative building for majoritarianism in India now runs on the confidence that such claims are never checked. So let us check.
In 2017, Amnesty International India documented 88 people whose eyesight was damaged by shotguns between 2014 and 2017 by the Jammu & Kashmir police and the Central Reserve Police Force. Some recovered, many did not. A single cartridge scatters between 360 and 600 metal balls with no way to govern where they land. The injuries caused by pellet guns are indiscriminate by design: shotgun barrels are not rifled and there is no control over their projectiles.
It is evident from the fact that fourteen of those 88 we spoke to were not protesters but women hit inside their own homes. Security forces themselves have been treated for injuries from the weapons their colleagues have fired, so dangerous is their use.
And then there was Insha Mushtaq, a fourteen-year-old girl, who on the evening of 11 July 2016 opened a window in her village in Kashmir to look at the street. She never saw the street, or anything, ever again. Fully blinded: Her doctors called it the worst case they had seen.
The state’s official data says 6221 people were injured between July 2016 and February 2017, with 782 of them hit in their eyes. The United Nations’ human rights office called the pellet shotgun “one of the most dangerous weapons used in Kashmir” and recommended its removal from the India’s arsenal of weapons for crowd control. When the Indian government was asked why it fires into the faces of children, it declined to answer, citing national security. Clearly, “limited damage” is then not a description that evidence can bear.
The Chauhaan teaser’s complaint that limited force produces no result is untrue because in Kashmir there has never been restraint from the government or a shortage of force. The position reflects what over three decades of force has done to the region. A government that answers a violation with another, graver violation does not earn trust; it forfeits it.
Protesters come to the streets because the doors of Indian parliament have been shut for them. And this is not just in Kashmir. The Indian government’s Pre-Legislative Consultation Policy, which was adopted in 2014, calls for all draft laws to be discussed with the public for 30 days. Yet, according to data from PRS Legislative Research, of the 301 bills introduced since 2014, 227 underwent no public consultation at all. Of the 74 that were published, at least 40 fell short of the 30-day time limit. The mother of democracy will not discuss family matters with the family. Further evidence that we are a parliamentary democracy only in name: The share of bills that have been sent to standing committees have fallen from 71 per cent before 2014 to below 20 per cent after.
In December 2025, the Indian government was asked if it is monitoring the implementation of the policy; its response was that it had never evaluated the policy and kept no record of who followed it. Increasingly, the most problematic commands of the government do not arrive as laws but as rules and advisories that the executive writes without any legislative consultation, let alone public consultation.
The state needs reminding that a country cannot keep calling itself a democracy while hollowing the word out one law, one rule, one advisory at a time. While doing so, the government has assembled a working dictionary: the dissenter is “anti-national”, the activist is an “urban naxal”, the protester an “andolanjeevi”, the reporter a “presstitute” and the boy at a funeral a “stone-pelter”. Once the words seep into the Indian mindset through propaganda, the deeds of the state need no defence. A movie teaser that recasts a maiming weapon as heroic restraint is not breaking with that dictionary. It is, in fact, reading fluently from it, in a medium built to manufacture assent.
To look at a girl who was blinded for looking outside a window and call it “limited damage” is not strength. Quite the opposite. When the Amnesty report was published, I went with my colleague Raghu to the man heading the Kashmir police: SP Vaid, who is quite active on twitter these days. The police headquarters in Srinagar and the ethnicity of the officials manning it was revealing and I will write about that another time. Vaid was hospitable as he accepted a copy of our report. He heard us go through our findings about the damage caused by firing shotguns into protestors by his men. He did not dispute the findings, but could not see why the weapon should be discontinued. It is a weapon that is not used for crowd control anywhere else in India, I said to him. It should be, he replied.
