A few weeks ago, pellet-firing shotguns made international headlines again, not from Srinagar, but at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi. Foreign news outlets that had not filed a Kashmir report in years suddenly had their pellet-gun explainer ready to go. Kashmir, after all, still gets clicks.
Middle East Eye came out with a report titled, “After ‘testing ground’ in Kashmir, pellet guns used on student protesters in India’s capital.”
In the report, an anonymous source said, “No three-year-old kid was killed in Delhi, but that was done in Kashmir. No students sitting in their homes got hit by pellet guns, but in Kashmir that had happened.”
These two places did share a story of pellet guns, but there is no comparison for the history of pain. The useful story, which should have been about the weapon’s usage otherwise, like how it was introduced, and on what scale it was used during the 2016 unrest, and how its re-appearance in New Delhi became a pointer to recall Kashmir, was lost in between this reporting.
What was worth examining is the reflex that followed these protests. It was the fastest a Kashmir story has moved through the Western news cycle in a long time. It just happened not to be about Kashmir.
That was worth pondering upon. It tells you how the story of Kashmir has come to be told from the outside: not through what is happening there now, but through a fixed stock and imagination of images—pellet wounds, half-widows, and curfewed streets. These belong to a specific decade, but the vocabulary has barely been updated since.
The argument I want to make will sound uncomfortable to some and obvious to others: Western media coverage of Kashmir is still running on a vocabulary built for a security regime of definitely not the current times, that, in its visible form, has mostly receded.
Where does the vocabulary come from?
To understand this lag, we must go back to history and understand how urgently vocabulary was earned. In the winter of 1989-90, when Kashmir’s armed insurgency took place after a rigged state election, years of political friction between Srinagar and New Delhi, and covert backing from across the border, with the help of non-state actors, pushed a generation of young Kashmiris toward militancy. That same winter saw the beginning of the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits, the Valley’s Hindu minority, driven out by targeted killings and explicit threats after decades as one of Kashmir’s oldest communities.
The times that followed in the 1990s were marked by enforced disappearances, cordon-and-search operations, and counter-insurgency operations that left thousands of men unaccounted for. Hence, the term “half-widow” emerged: women whose husbands disappeared into custody, leaving them without closure and in a legal and emotional limbo between wife and widow, some still waiting decades later.
The term itself deserves more scrutiny than ever, because this term “half-widow” measures a woman only against an absent man’s fate, reducing her to a position of marital status rather than seeing her as a person who has an existence in the community, spent decades building a life, raising children, and holding a household together around that absence. This term was not coined by any national institution but came into light through local reportage and later took a turn through the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) founded by Parveena Ahangar in 1994.
A 2011 report by APDP titled “Half Widow, Half Wife” is where much of the vocabulary was formalised, disseminated and travelled internationally. This vocabulary remains largely unchanged even in the current times. In January 2025, an article by Brown History opened with the same phrase and cited the 2011 APDP report.
Whether a label imposed from outside is the right or only way to refer to these women at all or whether it quietly keeps repeating the pattern of erasure it claims to describe is a question such international reporting has largely avoided.
Pellet-firing shotguns arrived later, introduced in 2010 and then following the killing of militant commander Burhan Wani, though none of this is old news for the people who lived it, and none of it should be flattened into a cliché to make room for a fresher story or newsroom vantage points. A woman who has spent nearly thirty years not knowing whether her husband is alive does not get to retire or reduce that grief because the news cycle has moved on or wants to create a new piece out of it.
But that is not the argument here. The argument is that this vocabulary has become the only vocabulary, and that a single frame is now standing in for a place that has kept moving while the cameras stayed pointed at 2016. A recent example of this is Insha Mushtaq, who was blinded by pellet guns in 2016. This year, a Bollywood movie Chauhaan drew backlash from the community for glorifying the usage of pellet guns.
Immediately after this, Al-Jazeera stepped in, revisiting Mushtaq’s case, quoting Kashmiri people with the same old stock of pictures. The report might be accurate, but it asked her to relive 2016 and her entire story.
What they didn’t cover was the J&K government releasing Rs 41.6 lakh to operationalise LPG distributorship which was sanctioned in 2018. Mushtaq is now completing her graduation in Braille.
Also read: J&K statehood just a matter of time—‘Naya Kashmir’ first has to resolve complex issues
The lens that’s missing legibility, not visibility
Here is the sharper claim, and the one I think gets overlooked even by the people who follow Kashmir closely: international coverage of this place has always relied on the visible injuries as its basic unit of evidence. A blinded eye, a bandaged head, a coffin. These are legible to an audience in a way that a choked data network is not.
This pattern is not only limited to Mushtaq’s case. But certain developments in Kashmir, whether the area getting its first multiplex, or the Emaar multi-crore project, which was Kashmir’s first Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), or high tourist footfall in 2024. None of this is hidden and runs daily in regional and national media. Although Al-Jazeera covered it, in the same breath it called a series of laws and policies an attempt at demographic change, citing anonymous locals.
Widely cited research by Durga Ray at the University of Florida tracked US media coverage of Kashmir for more than 15 years in different stages, where the US constantly emerged as a neutral party, focused on regional peace. By the final two stages, the earlier frame of a Kashmiri separatist insurgency against India had increasingly given way to one centred on India and Pakistan as competing states, with Kashmiri secession fading as the organising theme.
The more striking figure comes from the same study’s sourcing data: Kashmiris were the only group for whom unauthorised sources outnumbered official ones throughout, while official sources dominated coverage of India, Pakistan, and the US in every phase.
But since 2019, when the region’s constitutional status was reorganised and its administration restructured, the more consequential layer of governance in Kashmir has increasingly operated through channels that generate no comparable image: larger digital monitoring frameworks without a single frame of footage attached to any of it. Part of this is a newsroom problem too. Most of the Western media no longer have a bureau in the vicinity of Kashmir, and diminishing foreign bureaus rely on wire photography and archival image banks that are, by definition, biased towards the most recent major, visually striking occurrence.
Foreign news outlets rely heavily on diaspora advocacy organisations for quotations, statistics, and framing and many of the most well-known of these organisations were either founded by or formed their institutional memory around them. Their correspondents should be willing to document the present with the same rigour they did in the past. And it also means tracking slow everydayness rather than coming back only when there is a body count.
Since that shift has yet to happen, this type of coverage has only one lens, and it is a reductionist one. A place as dynamic and layered as Kashmir keeps getting flattened into a single photograph, one the world has already seen many times.
Tehmeena Rizvi, PhD, specialises in Women Peace and Security studies in South Asia with a particular focus on Afghan Migration and the Kashmir region.
Views are personal.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)