Top News

Kashmir's turbulence feeds Bollywood's lust for xenophobic content

Scroll | July 5, 2026 1:39 PM CST

Few Kashmiris have not heard the name of Insha Mushtaq. Even if they haven’t heard her name, almost every Kashmiri is likely to have seen an image of her disfigured face.

On July 11, 2016, as protests broke out in southern Kashmir’s Shopian district, Mushtaq, as you’d expect any curious adolescent to do, opened her window to see what was happening in the street below. Three days earlier, the security forces had killed popular militant commander Burhan Wani in an encounter and the Valley was angry. In a flash, Mushtaq’s face was hit by a volley of pellets fired by security personnel trying to quell protesters.

The pellets hit her face, skull and eyes. That was the last time she saw anything. Mushtaq’s bloodied face, with dozens of small wounds caused by pellets, has come to exemplify the horrors unleashed by the use of pump action pellet guns by security forces in Kashmir.

She wasn’t alone. In 2018, Mehbooba Mufti, the Jammu and Kashmir chief minister at the time, informed the state Assembly that more than 6,000 persons had been injured by pellet guns in Kashmir between July 2016 and February 2017. Of these, 728 had been hit by pellets in their eyes.

At least 54 persons...