By Naureen M. Haroon on November 19, 2019: Last August, shortly after India revoked the autonomous status of the disputed Kashmir valley, the British medical journal The Lancet published an editorial expressing concern about the physical and mental health of Kashmiris. Pointing to “gross human rights violations by state security forces and armed groups,” in the region—often described as the world’s most militarized zone—it lamented the suffering of civilians caught between militants and tens of thousands of Indian troops. Human Rights Watch estimates that more than 50,000 people have been killed there since 1989. The “people of Kashmir need healing from the deep wounds of this decades-old conflict, not subjugation to further violence and alienation,” the editors concluded.
The essay provoked an immediate and furious backlash. The Indian Medical Association accused the Lancet of committing “a breach of propriety in commenting on this political issue” and accused it of “malafide intention.” The British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin demanded that the editorial board “retract the article and publish a public apology,” while the Indian Psychiatric Society condemned “this unsolicited intrusion into the affairs of the Sovereign Republic of India.”
And this is just a sampling of the more moderate responses. The Lancet stood by the editorial, however, and perhaps coincidentally, the British Medical Journal published a letter from 18 Indian doctors observing that the communications blockade imposed by the Indian government had led to “a blatant denial of the right to health care and the right to life” in the Kashmir valley.
An American optometrist of Kashmiri origin, I was plunged into the conflict in 2016 when I arrived in Srinagar, the region’s capital, for a family vacation. Thousands of people were on the streets demanding freedom from Indian rule, and security forces were responding to stone-throwing youths by firing so-called pellet guns.
Often used for hunting wildlife and pest control in the West, these supposedly non-lethal weapons are in fact a type of shotgun. Each cartridge releases between 300 to 600 lead-based pellets, each of which can easily penetrate soft tissues and damage internal organs. When used at close range, the tissue damage is similar that of a bullet from a low-velocity conventional firearm and can result in permanent disability or death.
I visited hospitals to understand what was going on. I saw patients with more than 100 pellets in their abdomen or skull. A fourteen-year-old girl who was looking out of her bedroom window became unrecognizable within seconds due to hundreds of pellets covering her entire face and penetrating her skull. A 24-year-old’s left eyeball fell out of his eye socket.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com