The New York Times ran a detailed piece on Sunday on the ongoing violence, with curfew rendering streets of Srinagar into “ghostly emptiness” since protests broke out around mid-July.
India started using pellet guns in Kashmir in 2010 but this year their use has increased sharp. In the first 32 days of protests Indian police fired more than 3,000 canisters, or upward of 1.2 million pellets, the Times said quoting figures released by the Central Reserve Police Force.
The paper said this about the spontaneous uprising in the territory:
“This summer’s protests in the part of Kashmir controlled by India, the most sustained and violent since 2010, caught the authorities in New Delhi unaware. The stone-throwing crowds have no political leaders, put forward no specific demands and metastasized with alarming speed.”
The report says around 60 civilians and two members of the security forces have been killed. On the walls, according to the report, people have inscribed slogans expressing their opposition to India and love for Pakistan.
“But 2016 will almost certainly be remembered as the year of dead eyes,” the newspaper notes, as protests continue against Indian military presence in the disputed territory, claimed by both Pakistan and India.
More than 570 patients have reported to Srinagar’s main government hospital with eyes ruptured by lead pellets, sometimes known as birdshot, fired by security forces armed with pump-action shotguns to disperse crowds, the report says.
The patients have mutilated retinas, severed optic nerves, irises seeping out like puddles of ink. “Dead eyes,” the ophthalmology department’s chief calls them.
Kashmir is widely recognized one of the most dangerous disputes in the world. But Pakistan-India dialogue and peace process remains suspended.
Since the start of the protests, Washington has expressed concern over violence and urged Pakistan and India to hold talks. Kashmir has been the cause of several wars and conflicts between the two South Asian neighbors, which are nuclear-armed. Islamabad believes the UN Security Council resolutions provide a basis for resolution to the long-running Jammu and Kashmir dispute while New Delhi wants to keep it a bilateral issue between the two countries.
During the last seven decades, the Kashmiris have paid a heavy price and the two countries have prioritized their defense spending, diverting billions that could have been devoted to socio-economic uplift of the teeming millions still trapped in poverty.
