Members of Jammu Citizens Forum take out a Tiranga Yatra in support of the Army and security forces in Jammu on Wednesday. (Photo: PTI)
Members of Jammu Citizens Forum take out a Tiranga Yatra in support of the Army and security forces in Jammu on Wednesday. (Photo: PTI)
The PDP-BJP government has told the Jammu and Kashmir high court that the use of pellet guns for crowd control cannot be banned as the same “is not unconstitutional.”
It also said that the courts cannot guide the law enforcing agencies to act in a particular manner. “The court, being not an expert, does not recommend as to how the law and order situations are to be controlled (sic.),” the government said in its response to a public interest litigation filed by the Kashmir high court bar association, seeking a ban on the use of pellet guns for crowd control in the state.
The PIL said that the use of pellet gun has not only maimed and blinded but also killed many people during the two-month-old unrest in Valley and also on earlier occasions after it was introduced as a “non-lethal’ weapon in the state in 2010.
The government told the court here that “pellet gun is a modern method to deal with crowds, particularly agitating mobs who resort to heavy stone-pelting, rioting, arson, at the instigation of militants and separatists, with the intention of causing loss to life of police personnel and those of security forces, besides the public and private property.”
It added that pellet guns, technically known as 12 bore pump action gun, is used to fire cartridges which contain shots (pellets) of various sizes, measured on scale BB and 1-9. “While shot marked as BB is the largest in size, shot No. 1 is smaller than shot BB and shot No. 9 is the smallest one. Depending upon the size, the number of shots in a cartridge varies,” the state’s advocate-general Jahangir Ganaie told the court in an affidavit.
It said that the number of shots in a cartridge increases with the decrease in size and, accordingly, the number of shots in size 9 in a cartridge is more. It assured the court that the pellet gun is sparingly used and only when all the other modes of crowd control, like teargas, oleoresin grenades, stun gren-ades, fail to yield any desired results. The J&K police is presently using shot No. 9, which is the smallest in size.
