"Less-Lethal" Weapons Are Leaving Real Bodies With Permanent Damage - The Ethics Behind the Euphemism

When "Less-Lethal" Still Means Someone Loses Their Sight

The word doing the most damage in this story isn't a weapon - it's a label. "Less-lethal" sounds like a category of tools that are basically safe. But 82% of the 777 pellet-gun victims examined after the 2016 Kashmir protests lost vision to some degree.

A 21-year-old farmer died from a tear gas canister strike in 2024. The label was never a promise of safety - it was only ever a promise of something less deadly than a bullet, which is a very different thing. Here's the real tension worth sitting with.

India's law does regulate escalation - force can only intensify if a crowd doesn't disperse or turns violent. What the law doesn't specify is what these devices are made of, who is trained to aim them and where on the body they may never be pointed.

The Kerala Police Manual says lathis must strike only the shoulder-to-thigh region. UN guidance says kinetic projectiles must never target the head, neck or torso. These aren't obscure technicalities - they're the difference between temporary pain and permanent disability.

And when a shock-baton studded with nails or a pellet round fired at head height shows up in an actual protest, that isn't proportionate force operating imperfectly - it's proportionate force never being trained into the room in the first place.

This is where the state faces a genuine, not a manufactured, dilemma. It has a real obligation to maintain public order and disperse crowds that turn violent - protesters trapped between barricades and a charging police line is also a safety failure, in both directions.

But it has an equally real obligation, under Article 21 and the Supreme Court's own reasoning in Anita Thakur v. Govt of J&K (2016), to ensure that force used against citizens exercising their right to peaceful assembly is strictly necessary and never punitive.

The 2016 ruling didn't ban crowd control tools - it insisted that using them without proportionality violates fundamental rights, full stop. The exam-relevant point isn't "excessive force is bad"

• that's obvious to everyone. It's that legal compliance and ethical proportionality are not the same standard and the gap between them is exactly where the injuries in this story happened. A force can follow every letter of Section 129 and still leave a young protester blind, if the officer holding the launcher was never trained to aim it. Doctrine on paper means nothing without doctrine enforced in the hand that pulls the trigger.