Assam CM’s confession to ‘Utpat’ within the bounds of law

While four BJP chief ministers, namely Yogi Adityanath, Pushkar Singh Dhami, Devendra Fadnavis and Mohan Yadav, find prominent mention in the latest India Hate Lab 2025 report, a surprising omission is any mention of Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma. While the report mentions that 88 per cent of hate speech events in 2025 occurred in BJP-ruled states, the Assam chief minister and his state have been let off lightly.

The Assam chief minister returned from a junket to Davos on Friday, 23 January 2026. The very next day he took upon himself to defend the Special Revision (SR) of electoral rolls in the state on behalf of the Election Commission of India. Like several other BJP chief ministers, he made it appear that the exercise was indeed an exercise conducted by the government. An unapologetic Assam chief minister asserted during an interaction with the media at Nalbari the following:

• He indicated that only ‘Miyas’ (Bengali-speaking Muslims) are being served notices in the state during the voter revision drive as a tactic to “keep them under pressure”

• “There is no controversy over SIR. Which Hindu has got notice? Which Assamese Muslim has got notice? Notices have been served to Miyas and such people, else they will walk over our heads”.

• ‘There is nothing to hide. We are giving them trouble’, Sarma asserted, reminding the media that he had always maintained that 'Miyas' would be in trouble under his regime.

• “They have to understand that at some level, people of Assam are resisting them. Otherwise, they will get a walkover. That’s why some will get notices during SIR, some for eviction, some from border police (relating to citizenship)."

• “We will do some ‘utpaat’ (mischief), but within the ambit of law… we are with the poor and downtrodden, but not those who want to destroy our ‘jati’ (community),” Sarma added.

“My driver's mother has stopped eating ever since she received a notice, she is not an exception. This celebration of harassment and violation of due process by the Assam CM is the most abominable thing I have heard,” in recent times, exclaimed lawyer and activist Aman Wadud in a social media post.

In the last six months, Biswa Sarma has repeatedly made incendiary remarks targeting the Miya (Bengali-origin Muslim) community. With the next assembly election in the state barely months away, Biswa Sarma has become more shrill in accusing the Congress for appeasing the

‘Miyas’. Referring to claims made by Congress leaders that over 700 applications have been received from people eager to contest the election on a Congress ticket for the 126-member Assembly, Biswa Sarma told the media that the Congress should release the list of names of the aspirants. That would prove his contention that 600 of the 700 applicants were from the same community.

Biswa Sarma has made no secret of his plan to contest the election on communal lines. While the law forbids him to seek votes in the name of religion, like other BJP chief ministers, he remains unfazed. Before he went to Davos, he was quoted as saying that a ‘Miya Muslim’ had once told him that he would, if necessary, donate a kidney to him but would never vote for him.

The last census in 2011 had put the Hindu population in Assam at 61.47 per cent and Muslims at 34.22 per cent. Himanta Biswa Sarma has repeatedly claimed that only three per cent of the Muslims in Assam are indigenous people while the rest happen to be migrants. He also argues that since Muslim population has earlier grown by around four per cent in the 10-year-gaps between two census exercises, it must be approaching 40 per cent.

What Biswa Sarma is not speaking about is the six-year-long exercise in the state to identify bonafide citizens in the state, which reportedly threw up more Hindus than Muslims who failed to establish their ancestry and citizenship claims. While Biswa Sarma’s rhetoric portrays Miyas as outsiders and seek to arouse Assamese nationalist sentiments, the electoral roll revision in the state has provided him with another handle to go after Muslims, something which he has now publicly admitted.

However, the Election Commission of India has maintained a studied silence on Himanta Biswa Sarma’s public confession that notices are being served on Muslims to harass them. While he has carefully avoided using the term ‘disenfranchisement’, that appears to be the real motive.