Pulwama, Shopian (Jammu & Kashmir): When the pellet guns were used at Jantar Mantar in July, Mohammad Ashraf couldn’t sleep. He was taken back to August 28, 2016. “I swear to Allah, I did not sleep a wink that night when I heard about pellet guns fired in Delhi,” he said.Those days in 2016, Kashmir had erupted in protests after the killing of the militant Burhan Wani. Ashraf had been struck by a bullet during one such protest. Once he was discharged from the hospital, he was bed-ridden at home in his village, Rahmoo in Pulwama district, with 90 stitches across his chest.About two weeks later, the Special Operations Group and Rashtriya Rifles ‘raided’ Rahmoo. Ashraf thinks they came because people had put up a poster of Burhan Wani in the village. “The forces came at around 11:30 am on August 28. They broke the window panes of the masjid, and there were skirmishes and stone pelting. I was still very weak from the bullet injury, so my friends took me to an orchard 1.5 km away from my house, thinking I would be safe there,” said Ashraf.A bullet entered and exited Ashraf’s torso and the wound healed, leaving just the scars. But the pellet gun fired point blank at him by security forces disabled him forever. Photo: Junaid DarJust when Ashraf thought the soldiers might leave soon, one of them found him, still under a tree, at 3:30 pm. “He showered a volley of pellets into my torso from five or six feet away,” he said. Ashraf passed out and woke up two days later in a Srinagar hospital.“Even if I was offered the whole world or else a ban on pellet guns, I’d still choose the latter,” he said. “My bullet injury healed over time. But pellet injuries never heal. Permanently lodged in my body, they have left me unfit for work, unable to be in the sunlight for long or play any sports, walk or even rest. And worse than the physical impact has been their effect on the mind of survivors,” he said.“I used to zip around these hills on my motorcycle. After the pellets, I cannot ride faster than 20 kmph,” he said. He has almost entirely lost his sight.Ashraf, whose bullet injury has healed but the pellets scarred him permanently, with the motorcycle he once rode all over Kashmir. Photo: Pragya SinghWhat frightened Ashraf about the news from Delhi was not only that pellet guns had been used against protesters, but that it might become routine. He had seen that happen in Kashmir. At least eight in his village were injured by pellets on the same day as he was, three of them women.Those days, doctors across Kashmir struggled to handle the load of patients arriving with pellet injuries. Many who came for follow-up visits waited for hours to be examined. At one such hospital visit, Ashraf became friends with a boy from Kupwara who had also been injured by pellets. One night in 2017, the boy called him from Zero Bridge in Srinagar. He was about to jump.“I was on the phone with him until 4 am, mai usko manaata raha – I kept convincing him not to jump,” Ashraf said. That night, he promised the boy, and himself, that he would do all he could to help pellet survivors.Ashraf had once played volleyball, kabaddi and cricket. Now, when he watches his friends play, he said, “I feel as if I got the pellet injury today, not ten years ago.”“I have no problem with the bullet injury,” he said. “Jo roz mujhey yaad aata hai, ek baar nahi hazar baar, woh hai pellet injury (I remember the pellet strike a thousand times a day).”“Because pellet injuries never heal,” he said. “What a normal guy takes 10 minutes to do, a pellet survivor takes five days,” he said, “I am a burden on my family but I don’t want to be one.”Ashraf’s family spent roughly Rs 8-9 lakh on his treatment, which included nine surgeries, selling part of their land and from their savings. He lost his job as a manager at Airtel and now works in the fields, against doctors’ advice to avoid prolonged sunlight.What Delhi does not understand about pellet guns is how people around the survivors began treating them differently, Ashraf said. When a handful of victims received compensation in Kashmir, their neighbours would assume: inko paisey mil gaye – they got money for their injuries.“If today any pellet victim does not talk to the media, the biggest reason is their padosi (neighbour),” he said.Delhi also doesn’t know that pellet victims do not like the outdoors. “We avoid noisy places, we stay at home, alone. Pellet survivors tanha rehna pasand kartey hain – we prefer to isolate ourselves,” he said.Helping victims of pellet guns became Ashraf’s sole preoccupation in the months after his injuries. He started an association of survivors in 2017. He says he documented 1,632 cases of pellet injuries, including 92 people who had lost the use of both eyes. He wanted compensation, state assistance for them. “Not every family has fields they can sell to seek medical care,” he said.But in 2019, the police and security agencies started troubling him with frequent visits. The NIA took him to Delhi for questioning. The lists of survivors he had compiled were taken away and he never got them back. “The agencies said, aapkey paas ‘funding’ aayi hai…” said Ashraf.Also read: Kashmir Healthcare Situation: Doctors Call for Coordinated Efforts to Plug GapsThe association had raised around Rs 9 lakh, including donations from outside Kashmir, to distribute among pellet victims. As the calls and visits from agencies and the police persisted, Ashraf wound up the body, exhausted and embittered, unwilling to put his family through more trouble.Even now, he receives around 1,000 calls a month from pellet survivors and their families. “Aap kuch karo – do something,” many tell him. “Now I don’t answer them,” he said.“Delhi doesn’t know what pellet victims go through – and I hope its people never find out, and this ends with Jantar Mantar,” he says.§Ashraf was not the only pellet survivor observing Delhi from Kashmir as the student protests unfurled across the country in July 2026. Insha Mushtaq, who was 14 when she was hit by pellets in July 2016, was one of them. She was just a bystander, watching protesters, enraged and in mourning, hitting the streets after Burhan Wani’s death, from the window of her home in Sedow, Shopian.She had wanted to become a doctor. Today, she can cook, clean and wash dishes without help. But independence eludes her, for the pellets blinded her. She lives with her parents in a rented house in Rajbagh, Srinagar, while her father travels between the city and their village to look after her two younger brothers, who are still in school.When protesters in Delhi were hit by pellets, Insha was upset. But what also troubled her was how quickly attention had turned to the around dozen protesters injured there while the thousands of Kashmiris who had suffered the same weapon remained absent from the conversation.“I was upset by the pellet use in Delhi, but nobody talked about those here,” she said. “There is nobody to talk about those who were hurt in Kashmir by pellet guns.”Insha Mushtaq at her home in Srinagar. Photo: Junaid Dar“Did our voice ever reach the Supreme Court,” she asked. She is referring to the Supreme Court of India refusing to ban pellet guns when Kashmiris pleaded against their use.The top court reiterated this on July 30, when two pellet gun victims in Delhi approached it with a similar plea, seeking a ban on the use of metallic pellets against civilians.Insha couldn’t take her own case to the courts, for, she said, “Who was I to pursue in court? It’s not like I recognise the soldier who fired at me.”The injuries she suffered changed not only what she can do, but, like Ashraf, how people see her. The family received some government assistance. A job was given to her father, and a gas agency was cleared for her in 2018. It finally came through eight years later, in July 2026. Some people around her accused her of having become close to the government after the assistance. “I hate it when people say that,” she said.A few doctors took her under their wing, taking care of her treatment for free, but nothing could revive her ability to see her favourite colour, sky blue.“I don’t want to be a burden on others,” she said, saying she has learnt Braille. She no longer goes anywhere except to the dargahs of Kashmir. She has visited them all. “It’s where I find some peace,” she says. She has no friends left but one. She is not on social media.“All of this was written in my fate. What can one do?” she said.Mushtaq Ahmad Lone, her father, sold part of his land and took two loans of Rs 10–15 lakh to pay for her treatment. He sells apples from the land he has left, harvesting 100–150 boxes a year.“Right after she was hit, nobody came forward to help us, not friends, not relatives,” he said. “Because there is so much fear among ordinary people.”“There is fear,” says Insha, “but one must help others in distress after pellet injuries. And not just pellets – Kashmir has so many others who need help.”Lone has watched his daughter live with the 300 pellets that remain lodged in her body. Sometimes they cause infections; when they flare up, her eyes and forehead hurt. He has made peace with the life his daughter has been forced to live as a pellet victim, but in a way that Delhi’s students and leaders cannot comprehend.Mushtaq Ahmad Lone, Insha’s father, at home in Srinagar. Photo: Pragya Singh“What can I say about her pellet injuries? Yahan toh peechey se hi goli maar detay hain. (Here in Kashmir, they can just pump you with bullets from behind),” he said.§Amir Band, a lawyer in Pulwama, was hit by pellets in 2017, losing most of the use of his right eye. After this, he met other pellet injured, including Insha, Ashraf, and scores others. But unlike Ashraf, who began organising survivors seeking compensation and rehabilitation, Amir became preoccupied with documenting them, preparing for a legal battle to ban the use of pellet guns.He began compiling lists of pellet victims, collecting names and details that did not appear in official records.“Kashmiris don’t want to reveal they had been injured by pellets,” Amir said. “The slightly smarter folks gave made-up names when they went to hospitals for emergency care.” He, too, revealed his real name to a hospital much later, when he was taken for treatment to an Amritsar hospital.Admitting to a pellet injury could identify a survivor as a protester or stone-pelter, inviting further action rather than assistance from the state.Amir eventually documented more than 700 survivors. They told him about the taunts of their families – “Why did you go outside during the protest?” – and friends and relatives.“If you are a pellet survivor in Kashmir, you must find another survivor to marry, or someone with another disability. Your friends won’t treat you the same. We survivors laugh at their jokes at our expense, but we are humans, and it hurts,” he said. “You always think, if this pellet had not struck me, then I would not have had to hear this.”Amir filed an intervention application in an ongoing PIL filed by the Jammu and Kashmir Bar Association before the Jammu and Kashmir high court, seeking a ban on pellet guns. It was rejected in 2020, though with orders for rehabilitation and compensation for survivors.Amir’s pursuit of an unconditional ban on the weapon was then marred by the Covid-19 pandemic and the year-long restrictions after the reading down of Article 370 in 2019.When the bar association’s plea reached the Supreme Court, it was told pellet gun use would be suspended if the bar association guaranteed stone pelting would stop in Kashmir.Amir also helped raise money for survivors. Appeals were put out on social media and through the press. People contributed from all over. Over this period, he says, he received calls from a central investigation agency and repeated visits from police. They were interested in his “funding sources”.In fact, he was still a student when he was first summoned to Srinagar for questioning. He was kept there for more than 12 hours, though the interview with investigators lasted only 30 minutes. When he was released at 9.30 pm, public transport had stopped, and he walked almost the entire 35 kilometres home to Puchal, Pulwama.“The investigators told me to wait, saying they had called Ashraf to the office as well. They said they would cross-check my statements against what he told them. But he never arrived. Then, as I was allowed to leave 12 hours later, I bumped into Ashraf in the building. He told me that he, too, had been made to wait there since morning,” Amir said.The agency took away his records of survivors. He had a soft copy, which he deleted out of fear. “They know the use of pellet guns is wrong – why else would they try to hide the cases of pellet injuries?” he said.Also read: Modi Ministers Hide Behind ‘No Shots Fired’ But Govt Has Previously Used Terms ‘Firing’, ‘Bullets’ For Pellet Gun UseHe no longer tries to pursue the ban on pellet guns. Tired of the repeated calls and visits from various agencies, his family asked him to stop trying to help other survivors. “We Kashmiris know what it’s like to have a dream and not be able to even try to turn it into reality,” he said.“I am disturbed by the news of the pellet guns fired at Jantar Mantar in Delhi,” he said.Kashmir’s survivors wonder how people outside the valley would understand what a pellet injury means – would they, too, learn the hard way that the injuries are not just physical?Pellet victims in Kashmir can’t simply go to a hospital; they have to worry about what being recorded as a pellet injured means. They can’t ask for help, as compensation makes neighbours suspicious. They can’t organise, for ‘agencies’ might come, asking about funding. They can’t document what happened; the records are taken. They can’t even be survivors among their friends, as jokes are made at their expense.Eventually, even those who once promised themselves they’d help survivors, stop answering their calls.