How the 'Bangladeshi infiltrators' rhetoric gave BJP an edge in Assam

On the afternoon of 7 February 2026, a 17-second video appeared on the official social media account of the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP's) Assam unit. It showed the state's Chief Minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma, appearing to fire a rifle at the images of two Muslim men, overlaid with the words "No Mercy" and "Foreigner Free Assam." The clip was titled "Point Blank Shot". 

Within hours, the video had been shared thousands of times. Within a day, amid a storm of condemnation from opposition parties, rights groups, and 43 scholars, lawyers and civil society activists who issued a joint statement, it was deleted. A party social media official was dismissed. The Congress described it as "a call to mass violence and genocide". The Supreme Court was petitioned.

Yet a month later, Sarma announced he would repost the video personally, rebranding it as a "symbolic" communication. He explained that Bangladeshi infiltrators understood what awaited them. There was no legal consequence. 

Six weeks after that, on 4 May 2026, the BJP won 82 of Assam's 126 assembly seats — its first-ever outright majority in the state, and its strongest result since it first came to power there a decade ago. It consolidated the majority of ethnic Assamese voters in upper Assam.

The video was not an anomaly. It was, in microcosm, the story of how the BJP came to dominate Assam through the methodical, decade-long construction of an existential enemy — the Bangladeshi Muslim infiltrator.

A politics built on anxiety

Assam's relationship with migration and identity is older than Indian independence. The state's Brahmaputra Valley was settled, under British colonial administration, by waves of migrants from what was then East Bengal who were mostly farmers brought in to cultivate vast tracts of low-lying, flood-prone riverine land that local Assamese communities had left largely uncultivated. 

By the 1951 census, these communities had adopted Assamese as their mother tongue, and were registered as "Na-Asamiya", the new Assamese. They had, in other words, formally assimilated. 

Yet that assimilation never fully translated into political belonging. 

The Assam Movement of the 1970s and 1980s — a mass agitation against alleged illegal immigration from Bangladesh hardened the distinction between "indigenous" Assamese and the Bangla-speaking Muslim community, who came to be known pejoratively as "Miyas". The movement culminated in the 1985 Assam Accord, which drew a legal line in 1971 — those arriving after Bangladesh's independence year would be classified as foreigners.

This history gave the BJP, when it arrived in Assam in 2016, ready political content. The party had, in the 1990s, been confined largely to urban pockets and Bangali Hindu communities. What changed was not the demography of the state, but the political well-oiled machine who understood how to weaponise the local existing anxieties.

The making of a rhetoric

Himanta Biswa Sarma joined the BJP in 2015 after two decades in the Congress, where he had served as the state's most powerful minister and election strategist under Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi. 

Within weeks of assuming office as Chief Minister in 2021, he began reaching for a vocabulary of "demographic invasion" — framing the presence of Bangla-speaking Muslims not as a settled historical fact but as an ongoing, urgent assault on Assamese culture and land.

The most significant institutional legacy of anti-immigration politics in Assam is the National Register of Citizens (NRC) — a citizenship verification exercise ordered by the Supreme Court and completed in 2019. Its purpose was to identify illegal migrants who had entered Assam after 1971. Its result was the exclusion of 1.9 million people from the register — a disproportionate share of them Bangla-speaking Muslims who had lived in the state for generations, in some cases for over a century.

The tools he deployed were both rhetorical and institutional. On the rhetorical front, he introduced a repertoire of terms — "land jihad", "vote jihad", "love jihad". These terms portrayed Bangla-speaking Muslims as agents of a conscious, coordinated Islamist project. 

He framed Assam's electoral geography in civilisational terms like Hindus versus Miyas, native versus foreigners. 

At a rally, he urged Assamese residents to give "Miya Muslims a hard time by any means". He said, "Whoever can give trouble in any way should give. In a rickshaw, if the fare is Rs5, give them Rs4. Only if they face troubles will they leave Assam." 

On the institutional front, the methods were more consequential still. 

Between 2021 and 2026, the Sarma government demolished over 22,000 structures belonging to Bangla-speaking Muslim families in what it described as anti-encroachment drives. By his own account, his administration had evicted communities from more than 50,000 acres of land, marching bulldozers through settlements — and, in at least one widely circulated instance, filming the demolitions for campaign material. 

The state also converted 740 state-funded madrasas into mainstream public schools. Foreigners' Tribunals, the quasi-judicial bodies empowered to strip individuals of citizenship, were redirected to hear cases exclusively against Muslims.

Sarma further instructed BJP members to file Form 7 applications — the mechanism for seeking voter deletions — specifically targeting Miya voters, announcing that four to five lakh Miya names would be removed from the rolls. The legality of such a directive was widely questioned; the authority to delete voters rests entirely with the Election Commission. 

NRC: A legal instrument turned political

The most significant institutional legacy of anti-immigration politics in Assam is the National Register of Citizens (NRC) — a citizenship verification exercise ordered by the Supreme Court and completed in 2019. 

The purpose was to identify illegal migrants who had entered Assam after 1971. Its result was the exclusion of 1.9 million people from the register — a disproportionate share of them Bangla-speaking Muslims who had lived in the state for generations, in some cases for over a century.

The NRC exercise had initially been resisted by the BJP, which feared it might inadvertently exclude Hindu Bangalis — its own supporters. 

The passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in 2019, which offered a path to citizenship for non-Muslim migrants from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan, resolved that tension neatly: Hindus could be regularised; Muslims could not. The NRC and CAA together created a legal architecture of religious discrimination that Sarma's rhetoric filled with political meaning.

The electoral math

Assam is a state in which, according to the 2011 census, Muslims comprise approximately 34% of the population. Of these, an estimated 60 to 65% are Bengali-speaking Muslims called as Miya, concentrated in the lower Assam districts of Barpeta, Dhubri, Goalpara, Nagaon, and Morigaon. 

The BJP did not field a single Muslim candidate in the 2026 election. Its strategy was not to compete for Muslim votes but to render Muslim voters politically irrelevant — through delimitation of constituencies in 2023, targeted voter roll deletions, and the consolidation of every non-Muslim vote around a single, overriding fear. Interestingly, it followed the similar pattern in West Bengal in 2026 as well.  

How it affects ties with Bangladesh 

In the weeks before the election, Sarma's pledge to "push back" Bangladeshi infiltrators prompted Dhaka to summon India's Acting High Commissioner in a rare diplomatic protest. Following the election, Bangladeshi Foreign Minister Khalilur Rahman stated that Bangladesh will take "whatever measures are necessary" if there are any attempts to forcibly push individuals across the border from India into Bangladesh. 

Analysts who track Sarma's political trajectory note that the rhetoric he has constructed in Assam was never solely intended for domestic consumption. He campaigned on the same infiltration themes in Jharkhand. He has addressed Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) events in Delhi and reiterated the same narrative. 

Outlook India's profile of Sarma described the "Miya Muslim enemy" as a concept that has proved "portable" and effective precisely because it can be adapted to any borderland, any Muslim-minority population, any state where demographic anxiety can be activated. 

The BJP's 82-seat majority proves that the grip over Assam is absolute for now on. Now whether they attempt to convert that rhetoric into irreversible demographic policy is the question that will define Assam for a generation and, in turn, its relationship with Bangladesh.