The police brutality during the recent farmers’ protests has been more intense than the 2020 protests. Three farmers reportedly lost their vision as a result of pellet gun injuries, and several had their faces disfigured by the gunshots.
Shubkaran Singh, a 21-year-old farmer from Bhatinda, died from head injuries last week, with his family and farmer groups maintaining he was shot. Much before the protests began, the Haryana Police’s preparations gave an idea of how far the state would go to prevent a movement from taking shape.
Although the DGP of Haryana has denied using pellets on farmers, the medical injuries sustained give us a picture of the spectacular nature of violence against farmers protesting peacefully at the Punjab-Haryana border crossings of Khanuari and Shambhu, respectively.
The first instance of the use of pellet guns in India was witnessed in Jammu and Kashmir in 2010. In 2016, following the protests in Jammu and Kashmir after the encounter of Hizbul commander Burhan Wani, the police resorted to excessive pellet actions, injuring hundreds of protesters.
Subsequently, a petition was filed in the J&K High Court regarding the usage of pellet guns, and the court refused to put an interim stay on its use. In the year 2017, the Jammu & Kashmir Bar Association petitioned the Supreme Court of India for a blanket prohibition on the use of pellet weapons, which asked the high court to expedite the matter. It was in 2020 that the high court finally dismissed the petition upholding the use of pellet guns by the security forces.
The court reasoned, “If the protest is not peaceful and security personnel are attacked by violent mobs, they have to use force in self-defense.” Further, regarding the nature of force, it said: “What kind of force has to be used at a relevant point in time or in a given situation and place has to be decided by the persons in charge of the place where the attack is happening.”
It rejected the appeal by referring to force mostly in vague terms without addressing the issue of pellets. However, it mentioned that the Union of India has formed an expert committee to look into the matter. The report, which is yet to be made public, did not prohibit its usage but recommended that it be used as a last resort.
The petition is now pending in the Supreme Court and is expected to be heard in April this year. The petition challenges the use of pellet guns on account of them being ‘indiscriminatory’ in the very nature of how they target people. What is meant by this ‘indiscriminate’ nature is that when a pellet gun is fired, 100 pellets that are lethal are sprayed in all directions, where men, women, children, and even innocent bystanders watching the events are blinded, injured, and sometimes killed.
Doctors treating pellet victims have stated that it maims a person forever, causing partial or complete blindness. The spread and proclivity for their usage, as well as the degree of destruction caused, are unparalleled, making them unsuitable for managing the crowd as their operators cannot effectively control their targets.
This ‘indiscriminate’ character of pellets violates the UN Basic Principles, which specify that the use of force to disperse nonviolent unlawful assemblies should be avoided.
Dissecting the pellet and the law
Pellet guns, made of metals that resemble ball bearings, are classified as Kinetic Impact Projectiles (KIPs), which include weapons that cannot be aimed at specific targets but scatter ammunition widely.
The risks connected with KIPs include death or major injury to the head, upper body, or susceptible area if struck, the risk of projectiles penetrating the body, and a high risk of injuring innocent bystanders due to projectile inaccuracy.
In international law, the use of pellets is prohibited because it violates the norms of proportionality under international human rights law and customary international law. The UN Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials, adopted by the eighth United Nations Congress on Crime Prevention and Treatment of Offenders require the government and law enforcement agencies to consider the ethical issues associated with the use of force and firearms, as well as to exercise restraint proportionally.
Also read: Haryana DGP Claims Rubber Bullets, Not Pellet Guns, Used on Protesting Farmers
This includes the development of non-lethal incapacitating weapons for use in specific scenarios. Interestingly, the International Committee of the Red Cross, under rules 70 and 71, prohibits the use of tools that are indiscriminate and have the potential to cause unnecessary pain or suffering.
The International Committee of the Red Cross rules, even for warfare, do not accept attacks that may cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof that is excessive.
Pellet action against the farmers
The law enforcement agencies are likewise constitutionally obligated to display fundamental restraint and act proportionally to their legitimate objectives that are to be achieved. It is consequently crucial to ask what the state’s objective was in using force against the farmers.
Assuming it was to prevent the farmers from marching to Delhi, then the question remains: what if the farmers had crossed the border and arrived in Delhi? Have the farmers not demonstrated enough that their protests have been extremely peaceful?
The state is completely aware that the protests are not intended to generate a public emergency or chaos in Delhi. The 2020 farmer demonstrations have already given us the most powerful example of non-violent protests in the recent history of India. What explains the firing of tear gas shells from drones overhead, injuring hundreds of farmers, many of whom are elderly and have difficulty breathing, when a template of the nature of the protest had already been established?
Another question that needs to be asked here is: Was the use of cranes, boulders, and roadblocks to restrict the protestors’ from exercising their constitutional rights to freedom of expression and assembly not a force that the state performed right before the protests had begun?
By deploying pellet guns that left protesters permanently disabled and at risk of death, the state breached its commitment to protect and preserve human life. These violated both the constitutional requirement to protect citizens’ rights to life and health as well as the international laws that forbid such use in conflict, let alone in peaceful protests.
Today, the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) is widely used to discredit people’s movements, and it has become a standard instrument for criminalising dissent in democratic India. It is time that the Supreme Court of India not let the usage of pellet guns be normalised in a peaceful citizen demonstration. Suppressing people’s movement with measures such as pellet guns assumes protestors are a ‘violent and unorganised mob’ and attempts to disorganise an organised group of civilian protestors by using excessive force.
The Supreme Court must see through the recent usage of pellet guns in Manipur and Delhi borders against the protestors and strike it down immediately. It must now hear the long-overdue petition and prohibit the use of pellet guns altogether, especially during civilian protests. This would reassert its constitutional obligation to protect and facilitate free expression and assembly in India.
Kawalpreet Kaur is a human rights lawyer in Delhi.
