"Supreme Court examines pellet gun use against civilian protesters in Delhi"
Less-lethal weapons
weapons designed to incapacitate without killing, but capable of causing permanent injury or death
Proportionality doctrine
principle that state force must be the least restrictive means necessary to achieve a legitimate aim
The use of force by the state against its own citizens during public protests sits at the intersection of Article 21 (right to life and personal liberty), Article 19(1)(b) (right to assemble peaceably), and the constitutional mandate of the police to maintain public order — a subject in the State List (Entry 2, Seventh Schedule). The Supreme Court has progressively interpreted Article 21 to encompass not merely physical survival but the right to live with dignity, and this expansive reading has increasingly been invoked to scrutinise the proportionality of state force during civilian unrest.
The legal framework governing police use of force in India remains fragmented. The Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC), 1973 — now substantially replaced by the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS), 2023 — empowers magistrates to order dispersal of unlawful assemblies and authorises the use of force, including firearms, under prescribed conditions. However, no dedicated statute governs the use of less-lethal or non-lethal weapons in crowd control. Paramilitary forces deployed in conflict zones like Jammu and Kashmir operate under the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) and separate Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), which have historically provided wide operational latitude with limited accountability.
The pellet gun controversy in India gained national attention during the 2016 Kashmir unrest following the killing of a militant commander, when mass civilian casualties — including thousands of eye injuries — forced a public reckoning with the weapon's indiscriminate nature. A committee constituted by the Union Home Ministry subsequently directed that chilli shells and stun grenades must be exhausted before pellet guns are deployed, effectively designating pellet guns as a last resort. Yet the absence of a statutory framework means this directive lacks enforceable teeth.
Pellet-firing shotguns used by Indian paramilitary forces are manufactured at the Rifle Factory Ishapore in West Bengal. A single cartridge discharges hundreds of high-velocity metal pellets that scatter in an uncontrolled arc, making precise targeting physically impossible. This inherent indiscriminacy is the core objection — the weapon cannot distinguish between a violent agitator and a bystander, a child at a window, or a journalist covering the event.
The global history of so-called less-lethal weapons reveals a consistent pattern: weapons designed to avoid killing have, in practice, caused permanent disability, blindness, and death. The trajectory runs from wooden baton rounds in colonial Hong Kong, to rubber and plastic bullets during The Troubles in Northern Ireland (where 17 people were killed and a 10-year-old was blinded), to rubber-pellet launchers during France's Yellow Vest protests, to Chile's 2019 unrest where health agencies recorded up to 445 cases of severe eye trauma — later found to involve pellets that were 80% heavy metals, not rubber. …
Which one of the following factors constitutes the best safeguard of liberty in a liberal democracy?
Which one of the following reflects the most appropriate relationship between law and liberty ?
With reference to the use of pellet guns in crowd control in India, consider the following statements:
1.Pellet-firing shotguns used by Indian paramilitary forces are manufactured at Rifle Factory Ishapore in West Bengal.
2.The Union Home Ministry has by statute designated pellet guns as a weapon of last resort in crowd control.
3.The UN Human Rights Office's 2020 guidance explicitly prohibits the use of metal shotgun pellets in crowd control.
Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
Consider the following assertion and reason:
Assertion (A): Metal shotgun pellets are considered inherently indiscriminate as a crowd-control weapon.
Reason (R): A single pellet cartridge discharges hundreds of pellets that scatter in an uncontrolled arc, making precise targeting physically impossible.
Which one of the following is correct?
Which of the following constitutional provisions are most directly implicated when security forces use pellet guns against unarmed civilian protesters?
1.Article 19(1)(b) — Right to assemble peaceably
2.Article 21 — Right to life and personal liberty
3.Article 32 — Right to constitutional remedies
4.Article 355 — Duty of the Union to protect states against internal disturbance
Select the correct answer using the code below:
With reference to the global use of less-lethal weapons in crowd control, which of the following statements is/are correct?
1.During Chile's 2019 civil unrest, health agencies recorded up to 445 cases of severe eye trauma from pellet use.
2.The UN Human Rights Office issued its first comprehensive guidance on less-lethal weapons in 2015.
3.Following protests in the United States, 19 American cities agreed to pay settlements to persons injured by less-lethal weapons.
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