Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Feb 8: A video posted by the Assam BJP showing the Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma aiming a rifle at two persons wearing skullcaps, has drawn massive criticism from the Opposition, which termed it a “call to genocide” of Muslims, forcing the party to take down the post from X.
One of the two persons in the video resembled the Congress MP Gaurav Gogoi.
The video, uploaded on Saturday with the caption “Point blank shot,” ended with an image of Sarma dressed like a cowboy and wielding a gun, superimposed with phrases such as “No mercy to Bangladeshis,” “Why did you go to Pakistan?” and “Foreigner-free Assam.” In a statement, the Congress said the video “appears to glorify the targeted, ‘point-blank’ murder of minorities.”
“It is deeply abhorrent and disturbing and cannot be dismissed as random troll content. This amounts to a call to mass violence and genocide. It is a reflection of the true face of this fascist regime, which has harboured this hatred for decades and, in the last 11 years, tried to normalise it,” the Congress said.
“Considering the gravity of the matter, there must be strict action against this act of spreading disharmony and poison in society. It is clear there can be no hope from the Prime Minister to condemn and ensure accountability for this. However, the judiciary must step in firmly,” it said.
On Sunday, the post was deleted, and Assam’s state BJP spokespersons hav refused to comment on the video. “There is no comment. It has been deleted, there is nothing to say,” said spokesperson Ranjib Kumar Sarma.
The All India Trinamool Congress called Saturday’s video “a green signal for genocide and mass murder.” “BJP has single-handedly dragged India’s political discourse into the gutter… they have ground the secular, pluralist ethos of our Constitution into dust,” it said.
“Himanta Biswa Sarma was portrayed as a gunman shooting down people from the minority community. If this is not a green signal for genocide and mass murder, what is? The same CM has earlier urged people to harass Muslims through everyday acts like underpaying them, but this crosses every line. This is open incitement,” it said.
“At every opportunity, BJP plays the communal card to polarise society, pit communities against one another, and normalise bloodlust in public life. Immediate criminal action must be initiated against him. The Election Commission cannot remain a mute spectator; it must take cognisance of this open advertisement for targeted hate crimes against a community,” the TMC said.
The CPI(M) called it an “open call for ethnic cleansing and genocide.” “Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma and the BJP in Assam are using the SIR exercise and the bogey of ‘infiltrators’ to make highly communal, provocative statements and issue calls for targeted violence against Muslims. The latest video posted by the BJP’s official handle amounts to an open call for ethnic cleansing and genocide,” it said.
“The Chief Minister must be put behind bars before a catastrophe unfolds in Assam. The Supreme Court should immediately take strict action against him and his coterie for vitiating communal harmony, creating enmity between communities, and publicly calling for violence. Our secular fabric must be protected at all costs,” it said.
In September last year, the same X handle, which has over two lakh followers, had posted an AI-generated video with the text ‘Assam without BJP.’ It showed images such as a man in a skull-cap cutting meat by the road with the text ‘beef legalization,’ of men in skullcaps and women in burkhas and hijabs in different locations such as tea gardens, the airport, in an amusement park and a stadium in Guwahati, in Ahom dynasty monument Rang Ghar, and walking across a border fence in lines with the text ‘illegal immigrants.’
The following month, the Supreme Court issued a notice on a plea seeking directions to X and the official handle of Assam BJP to take down that video. At the time, a BJP spokesman had said, “We don’t use any agency; we write the content ourselves. We are not worried about what politicians who call themselves liberal have to say; our content is based on our fieldwork and the responses we get. Many ordinary people of Assam from across small towns and villages are on Facebook, and accordingly, our content there is in line with their sensibilities. On Twitter, we are more aggressive, that’s what people are responding to and like there.”
