How far is taking something too far during election campaigning? With each social media post, Bharatiya Janata Party's Assam unit hits a new low.
Over the past several weeks, Assam BJP has incessantly shared posts on X targeting Muslims. So much so that on October 7, the Supreme Court issued a notice to BJP Assam Pradesh (@BJP4Assam) and social media platform X to respond to pleas seeking the removal of a post that vilified Muslims in the state. The public interest litigation was filed by former Patna high court judge Anjana Prakash and journalist Qurban Ali and sought the removal of a September 15 post by the party unit, which the applicants believed was provocative and went against the secular fabric of the nation.
On September 18, Congress's Assam unit also filed a complaint against BJP Assam with the state police for the same post. Congress's FIR said that such content was akin to "promoting enmity between religious groups, and violation of the model code of conduct".
The Post That Sparked Controversy
On September 15, the X account of BJP Assam Pradesh shared an AI-generated video showing a glimpse of "Assam without BJP".
The video, meant to target the Congress and its leader, Gaurav Gogoi, had visuals of Muslims crowding the state. It implied that if the BJP wasn't ruling Assam, not only would beef be legalised, but the Congress party would run the state with Pakistan's interests in mind.
The video showed Muslim "infiltrators" entering the state and acquiring government land. The AI footage also showed men in skull caps, beards and lungis chopping beef by the roadside while Muslim men and burqa-clad women crowded the state's tea estates and public spaces, such as the Guwahati airport, theme park, zoo, stadium and the town. The 31-second ad ended with the warning that without the BJP, Assam would have a 90% Muslim population. "Choose your vote carefully," it said. The caption read, "We can't let this dream of Paaijaan to be true!!"
The post had nearly 5 million views and 19,000 likes at the time this article was written. As of October 9, the post had been deleted. Here's an archived version of the post and below is a screen recording of the post when it was live.
https://vimeo.com/1126841005?fl=pl&fe=sh
Assam goes to the polls around March or April 2026, and chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma is keen to retain his throne. However, the state BJP's X account has turned the political battle with Congress contender Gaurav Gogoi into a vilification campaign against Muslims.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Scrolling through @BJP4Assam: Vile, Islamophobic Posts to Seek Votes
Even before the controversial September 15 post put the spotlight on BJP Assam, the account had posted several videos and images portraying Muslims as savage outsiders who were Congress supporters.
Alt News analysed 100 X posts shared by @BJP4Assam between September 1 and 12. We categorised these posts as communal (targeting a community), political (targeting the opposition) and miscellaneous or promotional (advertising the party or tributes to party leaders and celebrities).
We found that nearly 40% of the 100 posts we analysed were communal in nature and could be termed hateful and vile. These used AI imagery of Muslims in skull caps, beards, lungis and burqas and suggestively referred to them as Bangladeshis.
While most of these targeted Congress leader Gaurav Gogoi, there were constant derogatory references to his supporters as Momins, Kanglus Miyas, Pakistanis and infiltrators; in other words, the enemy. Additionally, all Congress supporters were shown as Muslims coming from across the border.
Meanwhile, some posts were outright threatening. For instance, here's one from September 1 suggesting that Himanta Biswa Sarma's "shoot at sight" order during Durga Puja was apt for those who "disturb our mandir" and "break the peace".
A post from September 3 said "Kangaroos may be welcomed, but kanglus are not." The post reshared Himanta Biswa Sarma's post on illegal infiltrators being "pushed back" to Bangladesh.
Another controversial post from September 6, similar to the September 15 post, targets Gogoi using an AI video of a Muslim man who urges voting for the Congress leader so they can be allotted land to establish a 'Miyaland'.
This post from September 12, featuring an AI-generated video, suggests that Gogoi is facilitating the movement of people from Bangladesh to Assam using fake IDs. However, once Himanta Biswa Sarma shows up, these "Bangladeshi miyas" scurry away.
Additionally, of the 100 posts we analysed, the ones that were communal in nature were often viral, garnering the highest number of views.
BJP Claims Talking About Illegal Immigrants ≠ Islamophobia
On X, many called the September 15 ad Islamophobic and divisive, urging the Election Commission to take note. But BJP Assam leaders were quick to say that the video only showed the imminent threat owing to "illegal immigrants who are changing Assam's demography".
"If, in their logic, talking about illegal immigrants = Islamophobia, then aren't they themselves suggesting that all Muslims are illegal immigrants? Who's the real Islamophobe here?" state BJP leader Piyush Hazarika wrote on X.
But a closer look at posts by the state BJP handle paints a different picture. These refer to Gogoi as 'Paaijaan,' and his followers as 'Kanglus' and 'Miyas' — all references to Muslims — as if these are slurs. The imagery, too, makes it hard to discern whether it is identity that is being targeted or illegality.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Targeting of Muslims as Illegal Immigrants
The problem with Piyush Hazarika's and several other BJP leaders' logic is that it defies what is happening on the ground. Over the past few months, across border regions and other BJP-ruled states, several Bengali-speaking Muslims have been falsely labelled Bangladeshis and deported.
The conflation of Muslims, especially if they speak Bengali, with Bangladeshis is not new. The language bears similarities and over the decades, many from Bangladesh have moved into neighbouring states such as West Bengal and Assam in search of better work opportunities. A porous border and gaps in policies have allowed such illegal migration to persist.
Also, the drive to eradicate such "foreigners" is not new either. Since 1979, there have been aggressive drives by Assamese nationalists to identify migrants (read: Bengali Muslims). The 1985 Assam Accord established 1971 as the cutoff date for determining the illegality of citizenship. The state has seen killings, deportations and years of people being dragged to tribunals over suspicion of being outsiders.
In 2019, when the Assam government implemented the National Registry of Citizens to identify and remove "illegal immigrants", nearly two million people, both Hindus and Muslims, were left out of the list.
However, the crackdown against illegal migrants, or "outsiders", has intensified since the terrorist attack in Pahalgam in April and Operation Sindoor in May. During that period, there was a spike in hate speeches and attacks against Muslims across India. Read this, this, this, this and this.
According to an Indian Express report, between May 7 and June 2, over 2,000 alleged illegal Bangladeshi immigrants had been "pushed" across the border by Indian authorities. Since May, Assam alone "pushed back" over 300 people into Bangladesh of 30,000 declared foreigners over the years, according to a Reuters report.
Of these, at least 200 returned to India by June 19 after they were found to be Indian citizens. A Guardian report citing human rights workers and researchers said that instead of following due process, India sent several Indian Muslims from low-income groups to Bangladesh. Accounts of victims indicated that, despite having documents, many were forced to go to Bangladesh at gunpoint by border security guards.
Not just that, since June, houses of over 3,000 Bengali Muslims in Assam have been demolished, with residents evicted. These people have been labelled "illegal infiltrators" and encroachers. Many of those evicted claim the government is simply harassing them over suspicion, despite them having the necessary paperwork. The references to evictions in @BJP4Assam's posts cannot be missed either. Often used with language meant to warn, these evictions have been labelled as a befitting response to 'troublemakers' and encroachers who 'destroy peace'.
By carrying out these forced evictions and labelling Bengali Muslims as the 'other' who threaten to disbalance the population in Assam, the BJP is not only trying to cater to the deepest Assamese insecurities regarding infiltrators but also bolster its Hindu vote bank and posit Congress as a party siding with "foreigners". As many have pointed out, the Himanta Biswa Sarma-led BJP government in Assam has added the Hindutva edge to the already fraught identity politics in the state.
And the xenophobic posts on its X account show just that. Shrouded in the BJP-led regime's efforts in the state to weed out "illegal infiltrators", these posts vilify Muslims, threatening to further polarise an already fragile communal divide in the state.
X Policy
Politics aside, the vile posts by the state unit on X have also shed light on the lack of accountability by the social media platform in monitoring hateful content.
According to X's rules and policies, inciteful "behavior that targets individuals or groups of people belonging to protected categories" is prohibited. Specifically, the platform does not allow targeting people "with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category" and denounces "behavior that encourages others to harass or target specific individuals or groups of people with abuse."
Several of BJP Assam's posts clearly violate this. The repeated use of words such as 'Paaijaan', 'Miyas,' 'Kanglus' and veiled threats of eviction and deportations using stereotypical tropes of Muslim men and women are textbook examples of hate speech, harassment and incitement to violence, going by X's policy. However, the platform has failed to moderate such language and content.
X's policy on hate says "repetitive usage of slurs, or racist/sexist tropes where the context is to harass or intimidate others" could result in the removal of such content. However, "moderate, isolated usage where the context is to harass or intimidate others" could simply result in limited visibility.
Alt News journalists monitoring this X account also reported some of these hateful posts, but to no avail. The social media platform did not acknowledge these reports nor did it inform us whether or not any action was taken against them.
न्यूज़ हिमाचली News Himachali | हिमाचल की No. 1 हिंदी वेबसाइट CM योगी का बड़ा बयान, UP में सभी भर्ती परीक्षाओं के लिए बने एक एज...
Hello, my name is Ankit Sahu. I'm a 25 year old self-employed Pirate from the Chhindwara.