The teaser for Chauhaan — the latest in a line of films 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 protective masks are easily accessible online. Water cannons are dismissed as temporary solutions. What is required, the film 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 fired by the Jammu & Kashmir Police and the Central Reserve Police Force between 2014 and 2017. Some recovered; many did not.

A single cartridge scatters between 360 and 600 metal pellets, 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.

That is evident from the fact that 14 of the 88 people we spoke to were not protesters but women hit inside their own homes. Security personnel themselves have been treated for injuries caused by weapons fired by their colleagues, so dangerous is........

© National Herald