As NEET protests spur crowd control debate, Kashmir’s scars resurface
SEDOW(SHOPIAN): Behind a mesh screen, Insha Mushtaq sits in a mustard headscarf, offering a faint smile. She cannot see the camera or the daylight filtering through her window. She only senses. Ten years after pellets took her eyes during J&K’s 2016 unrest, she still carries scars that have become public property, resurfacing every time India debates crowd control.She wishes they wouldn’t. “I don’t want to remember. It doesn’t help and it hurts,” said the 24-year-old, seated inside her home in Sedow village of Shopian, about 75km south of Srinagar.Yet memory has a stubborn half-life. Images of 14-year-old Insha, her face wrapped in bandages after being struck by pellets during protests following Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani’s killing, travelled across TV screens and social media in 2016. They turned her into perhaps J&K’s most recognisable face of pellet gun wounds. Every fresh political quarrel over use of force drags those photographs back into public view.
Insha Mushtaq has been blind since 14
Recent protests over NEET irregularities in New Delhi have done exactly that.For Insha, the debate translates into reopening wounds she has spent years trying to close. “I don’t know whether I should talk or not. I want to do a job after completing my education,” she said, her father Mushtaq Ahmad Lone and mother Afroza Akhtar sitting quietly beside her. She has not abandoned her future. Blindness altered her life, not her ambition. She is completing a bachelor’s degree in arts and hopes to find a govt job under disability quota. Speaking publicly, she fears, could jeopardise that dream.“I don’t know what happened in Delhi but I know many lives were destroyed by pellet guns in Kashmir,” she said. Then her face brightened. “I am blind but we can operate phones.”Pellet guns entered J&K’s security arsenal around 2010 as a supposedly non-lethal alternative to bullets. They left behind hundreds of eye wounds, partial blindness and permanent loss of vision. Years dulled national attention, but memories never disappeared. Protests in New Delhi breathed fresh life into an old controversy.Political sparring has followed. Governing National Conference has accused opposition Peoples Democratic Party of condemning pellet guns in New Delhi while defending their use in J&K. PDP, in turn, has blamed CM Omar Abdullah for introducing pellet guns during his earlier tenure to tackle protests after about 110 demonstrators were killed in security action during 2009-10.According to BJP, use of bullets and pellets ceased after Article 370’s abrogation in 2019 because protests largely ended.Former J&K DGP SP Vaid, who headed police during 2016 unrest, said pellet guns were first used during 2009-10 protests and again in 2016. “All those 110 people killed in 2010 died due to bullets not pellets. Pellet gun should be used only as a last resort, from a proper distance and aimed below the waist,” Vaid said.Describing them as 12-bore pump-action guns, he said: “I’m not saying pellet guns are good. I am saying they are a better last-resort option than direct firing with live ammunition. If the choice is between bullets and pellet guns, pellet guns can save lives.”Politics feels distant inside Insha’s two-storey home. She now climbs stairs unaided. Certificates marking completion of classes 11 and 12 line her room. But July 12, 2016 remains etched with painful clarity.Clashes had broken out outside her home. Tear gas shells landed nearby. Curious, she walked to a window overlooking the village road. The instant she opened it, a volley of pellets shattered glass and ripped into her face. “My forehead felt like it was burning from inside,” she said.She was taken first to Shopian district hospital before doctors referred her to Shri Maharaja Hari Singh Hospital in Srinagar. She slipped into a coma for 4 days.Her photographs quickly became emblematic of 2016 unrest, prompting intervention by then PDP-BJP govt. Then CM Mehbooba Mufti promised assistance — gave Insha’s father a job. After spending nearly a month at SMHS Hospital, Insha was shifted to AIIMS New Delhi, where she remained for almost 2 months.On Sept 13, 2016, she was moved to Aditya Jyot Eye Hospital in Mumbai, where ophthalmologist Dr S Natarajan treated her for nearly 24 days. Natarajan, then hospital director and president of Ocular Trauma Society of India, operated on hundreds of pellet survivors during repeated visits to J&K that year.Doctors eventually told her family she had no perception of light. Blindness would be lifelong.An intervention proved transformative. “Nadir Ali helped me continue my education. He kept insisting that I should study. Had he not been there, I would have been finished,” Insha said.Ali, chairperson of J&K Centre for Peace and Justice Foundation, first met her in late 2017. “She was not born blind. She was angry, very angry and undergoing surgeries regularly for removal of pellets,” he said.Ali admitted her to special education department at Delhi Public School in Srinagar, where she spent nearly 2 years learning Braille, mobility skills and computer applications. “When I visited her home, I saw people had given her certificates but no one seemed to be thinking about how she would build a future,” he said. “She wanted to study and I wanted to help her. She had to learn how to walk independently, use a computer and adapt to a completely new way of life.”Today, Insha studies political science, English, education and sociology through Ignou. Graduation is within reach. “This is her final year… Our aim is to make her financially independent,” Ali said.Ali has another appeal, one directed at journalists: “Once you tell them to recount their past, they again slip into trauma. Let them heal.” For Insha, that may be hardest of all. The country remembers a photograph. She lives its aftermath. Go to Source
