Police used pepper gas to disperse protesters in these now-empty streets of Eidgah, a neighborhood in Srinagar.
SRINAGAR, INDIAN-ADMINISTERED KASHMIR – Showkat Hussain Bhat says that his mother died after police fired pepper gas on protesters in March 2013 outside his home in Srinagar, Kashmir’s summer capital.
On the second floor of his home at the time, Bhat says he was unaware that the gas had seeped into the ground floor, causing his 67-year-old mother, Hajra Begum, to collapse.
“My mother had arthritis, so she was confined to the ground floor of the house,” Bhat says. “She was also suffering from heart disease and had two stents placed in her heart. When I came downstairs, I found her overturned on the floor, and she was breathing heavily.”
Bhat called his brother, and they took her to the hospital. Doctors told them their mother was in serious condition, Bhat says.
“They asked us what happened to her, and we told them about the pepper gas,” he says. “They said that young people can cough up what they have inhaled, but for an elder person, like my mother, it wasn’t so. Whatever she had inhaled was stuck inside her lungs.”
Bhat’s mother did not recover.
“She again had breathing difficulty in [the] hospital even after being put on oxygen,” he says.
Her breathing became faster before she died. Doctors attributed her death to the pepper gas exposure, Bhat says.
Pepper gas has affected others in Bhat’s neighborhood, Srinagar’s old city area, as well. Bhat says that one of his neighbors, a father, bled from the mouth recently after exposure to pepper gas.
“Doctors told him it is because of the pepper gas,” Bhat says.
The entire community is at risk, Bhat says.
“A team of doctors visited our locality recently and told us that everyone, whether young or old, is affected by the gas,” he says. “They said our chests are involved.”
Since February 2013, three people have died allegedly from pepper gas exposure, according to Amnesty International and local news reports. Bhat’s mother was one of them.
Kashmir has witnessed frequent protests since Feb. 9, 2013, when the Indian government hanged Mohammad Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri convicted of being involved in a 2001 attack on India’s Parliament. Human rights activists say that Guru did not get a fair trial, and many Kashmiris say he was innocent.
The most recent clashes erupted on Friday, March 29, in old Srinagar as well as in two other districts in the region. Two dozen suffered injuries, according to local news sources.
The Jammu and Kashmir Police use pepper gas grenades and pepper spray guns, as well as tear gas, pellets, bullets and force, to disperse protesters. The police started using pepper gas in 2010 as a nonlethal method to control protesters, says a police official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
Kashmir is a conflicted region disputed by India and Pakistan. An armed separatist movement started in Indian-administered Kashmir in 1989. The movement is now mostly nonviolent, but people continue to protest human rights violations.
Parvez Imroz, president of the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, says pepper gas affects more people than just protesters.
“Not only does it affect the persons [who are] part of demonstrations, it affects passers-by and the entire neighborhood as well – those within homes,” he says. “Further, in the warlike situation of Jammu and Kashmir, there is repeated exposure to pepper gas spray, and this repeated exposure is extremely dangerous to people.”
Sajad Ahmad, who is in his 30s, lives in Srinagar and says pepper gas hurt his breathing in March 2013 while he was at home.
“I was sitting at my home in the evening when I felt a sudden burning sensation in my eyes, nose and lips,” he says. “The irritation kept increasing. At first, I couldn’t understand the cause, then I realized it must be the pepper gas. After some time, I really started gasping for breath.”
The next morning, Ahmad discovered that police had used pepper gas in a neighborhood half a kilometer away.
“If it could affect a healthy person like me so much, that too when it was used far away, what could it do to people living close by?” Ahmad asks.
Pepper gas is a health hazard, especially to children, the elderly and people with asthma, says Dr. Naveed Nazeer, a medical doctor at the Government Chest Disease Hospital in Srinagar. Pepper gas can cause temporary blindness, uncontrolled coughing and skin irritation.
“Excessive pepper gas causes irritation with whatever it comes into contact with: eyes, skin, nose and throat,” he says. “It can lead to sneezing, continuous cough. This is the effect on normal, healthy people. Persons suffering from asthma can suffer [an] asthma attack, and in those with bronchitis, it can lead to exacerbation, which can be life-threatening.”
Continual pepper gas exposure can make people progressively more allergic to it, increasing a person’s reaction to every new exposure, he says. Children are also more susceptible to its ill effects.
“The airways of children are already small,” he says, “and the gas can lead to bronchial constriction and acute bronchitis.”
Every time police use pepper gas in disturbances, the hospital where Nazeer works witnesses a surge in patients complaining of respiratory problems, he says.
Mir Imran, who runs a pharmacy in Srinagar, says that he has seen a steady stream of patients since February suffering from pepper gas exposure with doctors’ prescriptions for antibiotics and codeine, used as a cough reliever.
The police official who requested anonymity denies that pepper gas caused any of the deaths cited by Amnesty International and local news reports. There is no conclusive evidence to support these allegations, he says.
“We have been using pepper gas since 2010, and it is a nonlethal weapon,” he says.
Authorities are not revealing the specific formula of the pepper gas and spray that they use, says Nasir Qadri, one of two lawyers who filed separate petitions in March in the High Court of Jammu and Kashmir to ban pepper gas use against protesters.
“Pepper gas was first used in the U.S. against wild animals for self-defense,” he says. “Here it is used against people.”
Pepper gas contains capsinoids, an irritant naturally present in chili peppers.
The pepper gas that police use is legal and strictly adheres to regulations, the police official says.
Residents of Eidgah, a neighborhood in Srinagar, filed a complaint during the first week of March against pepper gas use in their locality, according to local news agencies.
Bhat says lawyers approached him after his mother’s death to file a complaint. He declined, saying he was not interested in suing and would be happy if police stopped using pepper gas in his neighborhood.
Shashikumar Velath, programs director at Amnesty International’s India chapter, called for security forces to suspend pepper gas use in Jammu and Kashmir and to revert to previously tested methods of crowd dispersal that were potentially less harmful until rigorous, independent investigations assessed its effects on the public, according to a March press release.
“The J&K government and police departments have clearly not established any guidelines or monitoring on the use of this pepper gas,” Velath wrote in the statement. “The use of it has been widespread and not subject to assessment.”
He also asked the Jammu and Kashmir government to conduct a prompt, thorough and impartial investigation into the three deaths that the pepper gas allegedly had caused.
The Jammu and Kashmir High Court directed the state government to respond within two weeks to the two public-interest litigations filed, one by Qadri on March 12, to ban using pepper gas on protesters.
The Jammu and Kashmir State Human Rights Commission began hearing a separate case on pepper gas in March. It directed the state government to produce documents for the case about the permissibility of using pepper gas on protesters.
