Kashmiris Are Not “Minimal Damage”

The controversy around film Chauhaan is not only about a film teaser, a dialogue, or social media outrage. It is about something much deeper: the casual way Kashmir’s pain is packaged as entertainment, and the even more casual way Kashmiri bodies are reduced to acceptable collateral damage.

Ajay Devgn’s upcoming film Chauhaan‘s teaser drew criticism for its portrayal of the Kashmir conflict, including a dialogue suggesting that pellet guns cause only “minimal damage.” The same controversy also involved a voiceover line that critics said framed Muslims negatively while using Rajput identity for a larger political message.

That phrase, “minimal damage,” is not a small mistake. It is a political statement. It tells the viewer that a Kashmiri eye, a Kashmiri face, a Kashmiri child’s future, a Kashmiri student’s classroom, and a Kashmiri worker’s livelihood can all be written off as manageable injury.

Stone-pelting should not be romanticised. Stones can injure people, including security personnel. But a state’s response to protest is judged by law, proportionality and human dignity, not by revenge. Human Rights Watch has said Indian authorities should prohibit the use of shotguns firing metal pellets in Jammu and Kashmir because such weapons cause indiscriminate and excessive injuries, even when some protesters are violent.

The record is not vague. Amnesty International’s briefing “Losing Sight in Kashmir” documented 88 cases of people whose eyesight was damaged by metal pellets between 2014 and 2017. Amnesty said pellet-firing shotguns had blinded, killed and traumatised hundreds, and that many victims faced long-term physical and mental health consequences, including learning difficulties, inability to work and repeated surgeries.

Human Rights Watch cited official figures showing that 6,221 people were injured by pellets between July 2016 and February 2017, including 782 with eye injuries. It also noted that India’s Home Affairs Ministry told Parliament that 17 people died from pellet injuries between 2015 and 2017.

Medical evidence is equally disturbing. A published ophthalmology study examined 777 pellet-gun-related ocular injuries over four months in Kashmir, showing how widespread eye trauma became during protest crackdowns.

This is why the language of “minimal damage” is so dangerous. It is not merely inaccurate; it is dehumanising. It asks the audience to see Kashmiris not as citizens, not as people with rights, not as students, workers, parents and children, but as targets who can be disciplined, injured and then forgotten.

The United Nations’ human rights guidance on less-lethal weapons says such weapons must be governed by necessity, proportionality, legality and accountability. Human Rights Watch also cited UN guidance stating that multiple projectiles are inaccurate and that metal pellets fired from shotguns should not be used for law enforcement.

This is the heart of the matter: a stone in a protester’s hand does not cancel the protester’s humanity. It does not give the state permission to blind a crowd. It does not transform a bystander into a legitimate target. It does not make a teenager’s eyesight negotiable.

Bollywood’s role in this process cannot be ignored. For decades, Kashmir has been used first as a postcard and then as a battlefield. Earlier Hindi cinema often treated Kashmir as scenery, a romantic valley emptied of politics. After the 1990s, many films began to present Kashmir mainly through terrorism, suspicion and national-security spectacle. A content analysis of Bollywood films from 1992 to 2015 found that Kashmiri characters were often portrayed in one-dimensional ways, frequently as terrorists or traitors, with only weak and patchy movement toward more complex representation.

Another academic study on Indian films related to Kashmir concluded that many such films frame Kashmir in ways that support the Indian state’s foreign-policy position, often showing Kashmiris as peaceful only when loyal to India and presenting armed resistance mainly as externally sponsored terrorism.

This does not mean every Bollywood film on Kashmir is propaganda. Films like Haider attempted to enter the darker moral space of disappearances, militarisation and grief. But the larger commercial pattern remains troubling: Kashmir is too often shown through the eyes of the state, the soldier, the intelligence officer, or the nationalist saviour, rarely through the wounded Kashmiri civilian.

The recent political turn in Indian cinema has made this more visible. The Guardian reported that a wave of pro-government films had blurred the line between entertainment and political campaigning, with critics accusing several films of pushing Islamophobic narratives. It specifically noted that Article 370 celebrated the revocation of Kashmir’s special status and that critics called it factually incorrect.

The same pattern was visible in the debate around The Kashmir Files. The suffering of Kashmiri Pandits is real and must never be denied or minimised. But Time argued that the film inflamed hatred against Muslims, portrayed Muslims in a uniformly evil manner, and distorted the complexity of Kashmir’s history, including political failures, militancy, militarisation and human rights abuses.

This is where propaganda works most effectively: not by inventing every fact, but by selecting only one wound and using it to erase all others. The pain of Kashmiri Pandits should be remembered with dignity. The pain of Kashmiri Muslims blinded by pellets should also be remembered with dignity. The suffering of one community cannot be used as a licence to dehumanise another.

Kashmir’s history is not a police briefing. It is not a movie trailer. It is not a slogan shouted over background music. It is a long human tragedy involving broken promises, rigged politics, militancy, displacement, militarisation, disappearances, torture allegations, killings, grief and competing nationalisms.

A responsible film industry would approach that history with humility. A responsible state would investigate abuses instead of hiding behind security language. A responsible society would ask why a supposedly “non-lethal” weapon has produced so many blind eyes.

The most disturbing thing about pellet guns is not only that they injure. It is that they create a hierarchy of humanity. Some people are mourned. Some are avenged. Some are made into films. Others are told their blindness was “minimal damage.”

That is the moral crime at the centre of this debate.

Kashmiris are not lesser humans. They are not background characters in someone else’s nationalism. They are not targets in a cinematic spectacle. They are people whose pain deserves truth, not propaganda; justice, not mockery; and history, not distortion.