Feroz Aslam, blinded a decade ago by shotgun pellets fired at an antigovernment protest in Sopore, wants the makers of a forthcoming Bollywood film to blindfold themselves for a day. "Then they'll understand what blindness means," he told Al Jazeera, reacting to a teaser for 'Chauhaan' in which a voiceover describes pellet guns as capable of only "limited damage" Al Jazeera.

'Chauhaan', produced by Jio Studios and Colour Yellow Productions and directed by Neeraj Yadav, is slated for an October 2027 release Deadline IMDb. It stars Ajay Devgn as an Indian security official confronting stone-throwing protesters in Kashmir — a premise that lands squarely on one of the most contested chapters of the security response to the 2016 unrest.

The teaser's closing image has drawn particular scrutiny: Devgn's character, wearing a skull mask, walks toward a crowd of protesters with a boombox blaring the 1990s Bollywood song "Jumma chumma de de." Critics say the juxtaposition trivializes an episode that left lasting physical damage across the Kashmir Valley. The Quint, an Indian digital outlet, ran an opinion piece on July 5 headlined "Ajay Devgn's Chauhaan Turns Kashmir's Trauma Into Propaganda," arguing the film recasts a documented pattern of mass injury as spectacle The Quint.

The pellet gun entered India's crowd-control arsenal in Kashmir in 2010, marketed at the time as a "non-lethal" alternative to live ammunition for dispersing stone-throwing crowds. Its use escalated sharply after July 8, 2016, when Indian security forces shot dead Burhan Wani, a 22-year-old Hizbul Mujahideen commander, in Bundoora village in Anantnag district Al Jazeera. The killing triggered months of street protests across the Valley, and the pellet-firing shotguns deployed to contain them left a documented toll: more than 1,000 Kashmiris have lost vision, partially or fully, since 2010, according to figures cited by Al Jazeera.

The pellet-gun controversy has never fully receded from Indian public discourse, but it has rarely surfaced in mainstream commercial cinema with this degree of directness. Bollywood's engagement with Kashmir since 2019 has skewed toward films sympathetic to the security establishment's framing of the conflict, and 'Chauhaan' arrives in that lineage. What distinguishes this case is the specificity of the grievance: survivors are not objecting to the film's broader politics but to a single clinical claim — that the weapon that ended their sight caused only "limited damage."

That framing matters because it collides directly with the medical and testimonial record. Pellet-gun injuries documented by ophthalmologists in Srinagar and by rights groups over the past decade-plus include full and partial blindness, embedded shrapnel requiring repeated surgery, and chronic pain — outcomes survivors and their advocates argue cannot be reconciled with "limited." Aslam's own account, of being blinded during a protest a decade ago, is one data point within a much larger, well-documented cohort, and his objection is less about artistic license than about a script line that appears to understate an injury he lives with daily.

There is a familiar tension here between commercial cinema's compression of a security-forces narrative into a single heroic figure and the messier, contested ground truth of the conflict it depicts. Films built around individual security personnel confronting protesters tend to render the protester side as an undifferentiated, threatening mass — a framing that leaves little room for the specific, individually documented injuries pellet victims have spent years trying to get acknowledged in Indian courts, legislative inquiries, and international reporting. The skull-mask imagery paired with a celebratory Bollywood number reads, to critics, as an aestheticization of that confrontation rather than an interrogation of it.

Whether 'Chauhaan' softens or revises the "limited damage" line before its 2027 release is an open question the production has not yet addressed publicly. The film's distance from release — well over a year out — gives its makers room to respond to the backlash, recut the teaser, or hold their ground. Past instances of Bollywood productions facing accusations of political one-sidedness on Kashmir have produced mixed outcomes, ranging from quiet edits to defiant releases unchanged. What is unlikely to change is the underlying dispute: between a state security narrative that has long characterized pellet guns as a restrained, non-lethal tool, and a community of survivors for whom that characterization is contradicted by their own bodies.