A now-deleted video generated by artificial intelligence and shared by India’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the state of Assam, home to more than 12 million Muslims, was widely condemned after it showed the northeastern state’s chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma shooting images of Muslims.
A 17-second clip shared on X and titled “Close Range Shot” went widely on social media on Saturday, but was removed following public outrage and criticism from opposition politicians.
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The video appears to be a combination of original footage of Salma wielding a rifle and an AI-generated image of Salma firing at a photo of two Muslim men under the title “No Mercy.” Sarma is accused of waging a xenophobic campaign against Muslims, who make up a third of the state’s population, ahead of state elections scheduled for March or April.
Local media identified one of the men in the image as a member of parliament from the opposition Indian National Congress party.
The video also included images of Mr. Sarma dressed as a cowboy and pointing a pistol, with text such as “Freedom for Assam for Foreigners” superimposed on top of it.
The Bharatiya Janata Party unit in Assam, which is accused of creating anti-Muslim rhetoric, has not publicly commented.
“I have no comment. It has been deleted. I have nothing to say,” Ranjiv Kumar Sarma, a local leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party in Assam, told The Indian Express.
The state’s chief minister has recently escalated his rhetoric against Assam’s Bengali Muslims, linking them to crime and demographic change.
Last month, he called on residents of Assam to inflict “hardship” on “Miya Muslims”, a derogatory term for Bengali Muslims.
“Even if it’s a small act like making the rickshaw fare cheaper. If someone asks for 5 rupees.” [6 United States cents]give 4 rupees [4 cents]. They will leave Assam only if they face difficulties,” he said.
In September, the Bharatiya Janata Party in Assam posted another AI-generated video titled “Assam without the Bharatiya Janata Party”, depicting the country being taken over by Muslims and describing them as “illegal immigrants”.
Only the union territories of Indian-administered northern Kashmir and the Lakshadweep Islands in the Arabian Sea have a higher proportion of the population than Assam.
In recent months, Indian authorities have illegally deported Muslim Indian citizens to Bangladesh.
Human Rights Watch announced last July that “Indian authorities have expelled hundreds of Bengali Muslims to Bangladesh in recent weeks without due process, claiming they were illegal immigrants.”
“There is no basic courtesy.”
Aman Wadud, leader of the Assam-based Nationalist Congress Party, called the video “very disturbing.”
“The Bharatiya Janata Party has proven time and time again that it has no regard for the law or even basic decency,” he told Al Jazeera.
“This also shows the despair of the Bharatiya Janata Party. They are losing ground in Assam. The wise people of Assam are ready to defeat this politics of hatred and division,” he added.
Congress said in a statement that the video “constitutes a call for mass violence and genocide.”
All India Trinamool Congress leader Mahua Moitra urged judges of India’s Supreme Court and high courts to take notice of Sarma’s video, asking “what more does this man need to do” for the judiciary to “wake up” in a post on X.
The rise in anti-Muslim prejudice in Assam comes against the backdrop of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s culture war against Muslims, who make up 14 percent of India’s 1.4 billion population.
According to the Hindu majoritarian ideology that guides the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, Muslims are seen as outsiders. Muslim asylum seekers and refugees from Bangladesh and Myanmar are particularly targeted as “infiltrators.” India also amended its citizenship law in 2019, making faith the basis for citizenship in the officially secular country. Muslims were excluded from the application.
Since the election of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014, dozens of Muslims have been lynched for allegedly consuming beef or transporting cattle, which is considered sacred to some Hindus. Muslims have faced discrimination in employment and education for decades, but their plight has worsened under the Bharatiya Janata Party as Hindu nationalist parties weaponized laws against them.
Human rights groups said hate speech and violence against Muslims had exploded in recent years.
Last month, a study by the India Hate Lab, a project of the Washington DC-based Center for the Study of Organized Hate, found that the country would record 1,318 hate speech incidents in 2025, an average of more than three per day.
The report added that at least 98 per cent of incidents targeted Muslims, with 1,156 clearly targeting Muslims.
Prime Minister Modi himself has been accused of using inflammatory language about Muslims to instill fear in Hindu voters. Human Rights Watch said in a report released in August 2024 that Modi and several party leaders “frequently used hate speech against Muslims and other minorities and incited discrimination, hostility, and violence” during the campaign for the 2024 general elections.
Mr. Modi was denied a U.S. visa in 2002 when he was chief minister of Gujarat state due to his links to anti-Muslim massacres. More than 1,000 people, most of them Muslims, were killed in the worst anti-Muslim violence since India gained independence from British colonial rule in 1947. However, PM Modi has visited the US many times since becoming prime minister.
