AHEAD OF ASSAM’S ASSEMBLY ELECTION, HIMANTA BISWA SARMA RAMPS UP THE HATE
Angshuman Choudhury, Manoranjan Pegu
As Assam’s 2026 assembly election approaches, Himanta Biswa Sarma, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and chief minister of the Indian state, has been deploying rhetoric described by his political opponents – and not without reason – as “genocidal”. On 9 February, the Assam wing of the BJP posted on X a video edited to suggest Sarma shooting at two visibly Muslim men, while slogans such as “No mercy” and “Foreigner free Assam” played across the screen.
That video was deleted after widespread criticism, but Sarma’s rhetoric in recent months has been in keeping with its incendiary messaging. On 27 January, at a press conference, Sarma said he encouraged “troubling Miyas” in order to drive them from Assam. “We are not hiding anything. We directly say that we are against Miyas.” he said, indirectly inciting social discrimination, including an informal social and economic boycott against Bengali Muslims.
Sarma has become a key political actor in Assam and across India’s Northeast for the BJP , and is often described as the party’s “key strategist” in the region. His words carry weight, particularly as the BJP is poised to dominate Assam once again after the assembly election, slated to start in March. When a journalist asked whether his government was polarising Assam during the 27 January press conference, Sarma’s response was alarming: “Assam is a polarised society”, he said, and “for the next thirty years, we have to practice politics of polarisation if you want to live.”
Sarma’s targets are obvious: Assam’s Bengali Muslim minority. Here, his hate speech forms part of a tried-and-tested strategy of sectarian polarisation that the BJP has deployed across India, and which it doubles down on when it falls short on its promises to voters beyond the realm of xenophobia. Sarma has claimed that Assam’s economic fortunes have risen under his watch since 2021, boasting of it as the “fastest-growing state” in India, citing data from the Reserve Bank of India between 2020 and 2025. The state’s Economic Survey report for 2024-2025 reports a more modest year on year growth of 12.74 percent. These figures are just papering over the endemic economic hardship confronting the residents of one of India’s poorest states. This is starkly illustrated by the fact that 980,000 educated youth were looking for jobs in Assam according to the state’s 2023-2024 Economic Survey; meanwhile, only 145,000 government jobs have reportedly been filled since 2021.
In 2025, the Assam state government held Advantage Assam 2.0, the second iteration of its mega investment summit, which brought in investment pledges of INR 5.18 trillion (over USD 56 billion). After its first iteration, in 2018, only about half of the promised investment ever materialised, and even that came largely from existing Public Sector Undertakings – enterprises where the Indian government, also under the BJP, holds controlling stake. There is little to indicate that the second edition will bring significantly different outcomes.
In Assam, as elsewhere, the BJP has made promises of development a big part of its electoral programme. And now here, also as elsewhere, having failed to live up to expectations on development, it turns to a familiar playbook to win the vote. Even so, in a state deeply scarred by communal strife, the recent video featuring Sarma marks a shocking escalation in Islamophobic messaging, making explicit what was earlier often hidden behind dog-whistle rhetoric.
SARMA’S PROVOCATIVE speech forms part of an unrepentant style of Hindutva politics that normalises pejorative language against Muslims – for instance, calling them bidexis, meaning “foreigners” or “infiltrators” – to frame them as acquisitive and potentially violent outsiders.
Unlike in other states, Assam’s public officials are conducting a door-to-door verification drive, without requiring documentary proof of citizenship as in the Special Intensive Revisions carried out across nine states and Union Territories including Bihar, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Kerala and Gujarat among others. Some 243000 voters from across different religious groups have been removed from the electoral rolls as a result of the process in Assam.
Opposition leaders in these states have already claimed that the SIR process is being used to ensure the BJP’s continued dominance in other Indian states. Reports are already emerging from Assam that Form 7, meant for limited corrections such as death and permanent change of residence, is being used to file mass objection notices and delete the names of genuine voters, many of them Bengali Muslims. Where other BJP leaders have tried to dodge the allegations of manipulation, Sarma openly declared that he had ordered the filings. He added that, by his estimate, at least 400,000 Bengali Muslims, and perhaps even half a million could eventually be struck off the voter lists.
Aman Wadud & Harsh Mander on the plight of Bengali Muslims in Assam
This marked perhaps the first time that a ruling government leader had admitted to deliberate sabotage of the electoral revision process. Indeed, rather than backing down, Sarma has threatened those who have tried to stand against him. When the rights activist Harsh Mander sought to initiate a criminal case against Sarma for his remarks about Bengali Muslims and the SIR process, Sarma threatened to file “at least 100” cases against Mander in retaliation.
Sarma also continues on occasion to use a specific communal framing in an attempt to obfuscate his anti-Muslim messaging. “Polarisation is not between Hindu and Muslim,” he has said in his defence. “Polarisation is between Assamese and Bangladeshi.”. In Assam, the term “Bangladeshi” is a coded reference to the state’s significant Bengali, or Bengali-speaking, Muslim population. Its use is part of the dominant perception in Assamese public life that all Bengali Muslims entered the state illegally and are therefore liable to be deported to Bangladesh.
This is, of course, far from true; most Bengali Muslim families in the Brahmaputra Valley have intergenerational links to Assam from a time when modern-day Bangladesh had not even been formed. Some of them arrived in what is now Assam even prior to Partition in 1947. Assam is the only homeland they have. Even by the conservative standards of the Assam Accord – an agreement signed in 1985 between leaders of the Assam Movement and the central and state governments – and the 2014 judgment of the Supreme Court of India that ordered the updating of the National Register of Citizens (NRC), those who arrived in the state from East Pakistan, later Bangladesh, before 1971 are legally recognised as Indian citizens. Yet the social vocabulary in Assam is such that it subverts and exceeds legality.
In this context, the word “Miya” becomes a catch-all term for the ever-suspect Bengali Muslim, used widely in Assamese public discourse to undermine the community’s claims to belonging in the state. While Sarma and his allies have tried to reposition his speeches as referring to the “illegal Bangladeshi” and not Bengali Muslims in general, the chief minister’s own rhetoric from some years ago demonstrates that the term is a pejorative reference to the entire Bengali Muslim community of Assam.
Sarma’s strategic distinction has another key motive. By emphasising “Bangladeshi” over just “Muslims”, he seeks to distinguish the “non-indigenous”, “Miya” community from “indigenous” Assamese Muslim communities.
The latter trace their origins to mediaeval-era migration into Assam and consider themselves the “original” Muslims of the state – unlike the former, who moved during the colonial period. The BJP has exploited this historical cleavage by building an alliance of political convenience with the Assamese Muslim elite. It is a different matter, however, that ordinary Assamese Muslims are also reportedly facing harassment and exclusion in the ongoing SIR process.
Sarma’s denotative position on the two communities is a sleight of hand to dress up standard Hindu Right sectarianism as Assamese ethnonationalism, an ideology that many Assamese-speaking Muslim communities also subscribe to. It also fits within the Hindu Right’s larger political strategy of building alliances with smaller minorities within larger minority groups as elections approach.
Therefore, Sarma’s remarks are carefully framed to speak to two specific political audiences. First, they speak loudly to large sections of Assam’s caste Hindus and “indigenous” Muslim Assamese, who see the “Miya” as a socio-cultural threat and form the BJP’s core vote banks in Assam’s Brahmaputra Valley. Second, his unabashed anti-Bangladeshi rhetoric translates well for the pan-Indian Hindutva audience, reaffirming Sarma’s credentials as a hero defending Hindu India against a civilisational Muslim threat.
At one level, Sarma’s hate speech also reflects electoral anxiety. Besides questions being raised about the efficiency of his government and its ability to deliver on key electoral issues, there is also growing discontent within sections of Assam’s Scheduled Tribe (ST) communities – the official designation for India’s tribal groups. In November, Assam’s cabinet proposed the creation of a new ST category, called the “ST (Valley)”, and inclusion in it of six communities – the Ahoms, Sutias, Moran, Matak, Koch-Rajbongshi and Adivasis. In Assam, before this proposal, ST (Plains) communities received 10 percent of reserved seats in public education and employment, while ST (Hills) communities were entitled to 5 percent. The move to create a new category and grant ST status to six more communities – especially to the Ahom and Koch-Rajbonghsis – could destabilise this delicate arithmetic and thus, has been strongly opposed by existing ST communities, who until recently were protesting the proposal in large numbers.
Further, a recent wave of deadly violence between the ethnic Karbi and the Hindi-speaking Bihari communities in Karbi Anglong district has exposed the tricky ethno-political landscape that the BJP faces in Assam. On 22 December, the Karbi tribes, claiming that Bihari communities were encroaching on their grazing reserves, burned down the ancestral home of a BJP leader and the Kheroni market, looting the shops of Bihari residents while the police watched on. This has put the party in an awkward spot, having to placate two equally indispensable vote banks.
In such a context, fanning the flames of anti-“Miya” hate becomes the quickest and easiest way to blunt popular discontent and rally the vote behind Sarma and the BJP. The narrative of “indigeneity” is a political golden goose for dominant parties in Assam. No regional or national party can oppose it directly, and even the opposition in the state has uncritically embraced the language of indigeneity. For instance, in the aftermath of the Karbi Anglong violence, the Indian National Congress, the BJP’s main challenger, claimed that the BJP had not been able to adequately protect the interests of “indigenous” people.
It is also possible that Sarma’s inflammatory speech is designed to provoke an adverse reaction from Bengali Muslims. If the community delivers such a reaction, he can then weaponise it to project the minority community as adversaries of the Assamese and thus agents of division in Assam. This would worsen the polarised public discourse, which would only benefit the BJP’s political fortunes.
NEVERTHELESS, WE MUST AVOID the lure of seeing Sarma’s hateful rhetoric through the singular lens of political strategy. This rhetoric borrows from a longer history of anti-“Miya” hate in Assamese public life. For instance, during the demonstrations in 2019 against the divisive Citizenship (Amendment) Act – which effectively created new communal distinctions in India’s citizenship laws – images of ants and crows were often deployed in murals and other visual discourse in Assam to dehumanise Bengali Muslims and portray them as scavengers. A group of Miya poets were hounded by Assamese civil society at the time simply for articulating their community’s painful history and anxieties in verse.
Sarma has injected new emotional impetus to preexisting registers of sectarian hostility and othering. By using words like kosto (pain) and digdaar (harrassment or harrass), Sarma seeks to take his politics of anti-“Miya” hate to the average Assamese. His verbal violence relies on identifiable terms used in daily life.
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By also appealing to the public to participate in the economic boycott of Bengali Muslims, Sarma seeks to democratise and decentralise hatred. Through this, the average Assamese is made to feel like an important node in a larger apparatus of Bengali Muslim disenfranchisement, and thus an active author in the redrafting of Assamese history. It is majoritarian cultural empowerment of the most sinister kind. Sarma has gone as far as to frame his call for an economic boycott in the Gandhian language of “non-cooperation”, bastardising the very essence of Indian history and Gandhian philosophy.
Sarma’s hate speech could very well translate into physical violence against minorities on the ground – as already appears to be happening in some parts of Assam. A recent viral video on Facebook showed a digital content creator forcing a Bengali Muslim to carry him on his shoulders and threatening him with a large spade. “Gave pain to Miyas part 2” the caption to the video read.
Sarma’s messaging serves to organise otherwise disparate cliques of Assamese ethnonationalists into a single “organic” crowd with a common enemy. Different communities within Assam are now bound together under a monochromatic and clearly Hindu-centric “indigenous” identity. Other identities do not find space, and even if they do – as in the case of the “Assamese Muslims” – it is on caste Hindu terms. This is in stark contrast to how Assam is often referred to as a “melting pot”, where different cultures and identities are blended to form a harmonious whole. Assam appears to have become a different sort of melting pot today – one in which toxic politics cooks a deadly concoction of communal, majoritarian belligerence.?