The “point-blank shot” video was deleted as soon as the first signs of criticism surfaced
There is no way of ascertaining the claim that the creators expected controversy
They decided to still share the video, hoping it would give their supporters enough time to spread the polemical message
A video of Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma shooting at images of Muslims—two individuals engaged in seemingly everyday routine activity—was posted on the official “BJP Assam Pradesh” ‘X” handle by the state IT cell on February 8. The video was taken down after public hue and cry about the blatant xenophobia and violent ethno-nationalist sentiment echoed by an official arm of the state machinery.
The Opposition termed this as a “call to genocide”, with various officials referring to the incident using language that sought to express the shock of such a brazen act of violence—even if it is “mediatised”: “attack” “mass murderers”, “venom, hatred and violence”, “murder of minorities” “vilest form of hate and political targeting”. But the opposition’s creative slurs, and calls for judicial retribution, only highlight the seriousness of this act.
Various commentators condemned the state bureaucracy’s apathetic and predatory strategy of demonising an entire community, openly endorsed by the Centre. The Indian National Congress national spokesperson Shama Mohammed called out the Prime Minister, referring to his endorsement of the Assam CM—Modi’s “Favourite man” (who has hit headlines several times before, because of his aggressive stance against Muslims).
While the video was taken down, the damage has been done. In the wake of no public statement by the federal leadership about this “lapse”, Sarma claims to have been oblivious to the video, even as he injects more adrenaline to his earlier stance: “I am ready to go to jail… But I stand by my words. I am against Bangladeshi infiltrators and I will continue to be against them”.
This act must be seen in the context of multiple assertions of fascist impulse, charged with hatred, across various media platforms in the country, that are usually analysed by commentators as occurring in the “run-up” to some election or the other. In a public statement released not less than a fortnight ago, signed by 188 academics, activists, and lawyers, while condemning the Sarma led-government policy to “make the Miya people suffer” (Miya is a pejorative term for Bengali Muslims), the signatories describe the government’s actions as ushering in “a new era of impunity” for hate speech in the state.
Hostile Ground: A New “Normal”
“Impunity” lies at the centre of a political strategy that casts a feeble eye, at times, even openly endorsing organic, media-driven, frenzied expressions of predatory violence on Muslims. There has been an alarming spurt of such instances in the last decade of the BJP-rule. The nature of the “townhall”— a public space for expression and narrative building—has transformed (even globally) with the rise of majoritarianism and social media as a platform for urgent, half-formed, sensationalist opinion.
One is reminded of the master orator Atal Behari Vajpayee’s dog-whistle framing, uttered on the eve of the Babri Masjid demolition, where he doesn’t refer to the heinous act directly—“zameen ko samtal karna padega” (the ground must be levelled). The various controversies around films, performances and public figures’ articulations symbolise that this ground has been “levelled” for all-out war and ethnic cleansing in the form of attacks on minorities.
The “godi media” has performed this role with great gusto in the past, using metaphor as a tool to collapse fiction into reality.
Even in the reportage of this incident, a media headline manipulatively equates the Assam BJP’s act with the opposition’s backlash, turning it into “Opposition trains guns at BJP over Himanta’s now-deleted ‘point-blank’ video”. But how can ordinary reel-weaned citizens speak with any innocence about such things as “metaphor” and “allegory”, in the age of AI, when it has become impossible to separate fantasy and representations from real events?
There have been several instances where realistic video-game footage shared on social media has ‘misled’ millions of people into believing that it is real footage of conflict in places such as Israel-Iran and Russia-Ukraine. This is the new normal we live in, where it becomes important to critically analyse the ways in which framing, cinematography, plot-building and delivery manipulate public emotions. The sophistication of these tools—the medium—at the disposal of the average content creator makes the cognitive impact and cumulative “feeling” of the content—the message—more difficult to isolate.
Leni Riefenstahl’s use of low-angle shots and elevated vantage points in “Triumph of the Will” are often invoked while speaking about propaganda and the glorification of the then supreme leader—Hitler. Critics are divided about the technical finesse of Riefenstahl’s camera work, but then again, the message clearly exceeded the medium, buffeted by a simple, partisan strategy of redirecting public despair towards a shared enemy—the Jews.
Performing Hindutva: Choreographies of Violence
The current political climate embodies a hyper-real replication of that strategy, redirecting the gaze of a public numbed by predatory nationalism. In popular media narratives, creators have become bolder and more shameless in adopting this vocabulary.
In a series of mediocre reels showing snippets from live stand-up performances by the “comedian” Gaurav Gupta—Pakistan becomes the easy target to channel majoritarian hatred. Gupta uses the basic narrative technique of the “roast” in his crowd work (most notably popularised by AIB in the Indian context). He singles out a Pakistani member in the audience and then proceeds to roast them by graffitiing the alleged complaints and resentments of the Indian state on their body—turning them into a living “target” for his jokes.
In an early video, from an international tour in 2025, that went viral, he has an unexpected interaction with a fan that begins with surprise at learning that he is Pakistani. Members of the crowd spontaneously chant “Sindoor” and Gupta is gleeful as he playfully admonishes them, asking them to “behave”. He is clearly enjoying the polarised spectacle he has orchestrated; this was fresh after the Pahalgam attack, and the jingoistic public chest-thumping around ‘Operation Sindoor’. He proceeds to tell this member: “Chalo Hanuman chalisa padho ab, padho, padho!” (C’mon read the Hanuman Chalisa. Go on Read! Read!).
The violent historical subtext of this apparently ‘humorous’ request, depicted more openly in different forms in the media these days, immediately brings back memories of pogroms and riots—and myriad carnivals of brutal, uninhibited bloodlust and savagery. Gupta is riding on a travesty of machismo best exemplified by Sarma’s bravado in the aftermath of his IT cell’s devious promotion.
Like Sarma, in the current political climate, Gupta has impunity. He goes on to victimise the individual who has no choice but to appear “sporting”—"Toh tumhe samajh nahi aata, nahi milega tumhe? Itne saalon se keh rahe hain nahi milega, nahi milega, phir aa jaate ho tum.” (Don’t you understand, you’re not getting it. Since so many years we are saying you won’t get it. Again and again, you come back). Even though he doesn’t mention land, borders or place, nobody is fooled about what he is referring. Gupta’s manner, laced with the audience’s celebratory laughter, caricatures into a blistering bureaucrat threatening his rival in a “war-room” scenario in some Vivek Agnihotri film. Under “normal” circumstances, the entire exchange might have been uncomfortable and disconcerting. But instead, the scene is punctuated with jeers and ethnically charged slogans.
In another video, egged on by the success of the first performance, Gupta goes on to make fun of another Pakistani audience member, surprised that they have come to attend despite having seen the first reel. Continuing a long tradition of tone-deaf middle-aged patriarchal Indian men in power, he casually reprimands the boisterous audience, saying: “Ab nahi, hamari bahu hain abhi ye!” (Don’t heckle her now, she is our daughter-in law). The woman, eager to be seen amicably, answers his loaded leading question about the cultural difference between Indian and Pakistani men by saying: “Indians are more tolerant”. This is enough to trigger Gupta’s pompous assertion, agreeing with her, doing the work of leaders like Sarma—Yes! We are tolerant, or else “we” would have wiped our neighbours off the map.
Documentary: Realism of Performative Nationalism in Indian Cinema
In Gupta’s first viral “Pakistani” reel, when the audience member reveals his name as “Hasan”, without missing a beat, the comedian asks him, “Code Name?”. The martial metaphor, and the reference to espionage, is not lost on an audience weaned on openly anti-Muslim and anti-Pakistan films, parading as “war-films” with insensitive portrayals turning Pakistani actors into evil caricatures of disgust.
The noted difference in the discourse on such films in the last decade is the way in which fictional theories that have been proven as false are framed as truth. For instance, the Sudipto Sen 2023 film, The Kerala Story, narrativises alleged “documentary” evidence of “love jihad”, portraying forced conversions of women and subsequent recruitment into ISIS after being lured by Muslim men.
The film claimed to be inspired by real events, with a trailer even citing the figure of 32,000 women known to have joined ISIS. While the filmmakers were forced to acknowledge that the figures were unverified, audiences have repeatedly alluded to these films as “true history”. The Kerala Story won two awards at the 71st National Film Awards: Best Direction (Sen) and Best Cinematography. Even though there was a “storm of criticism”, the second instalment of the film is set to release this month.
Proponents of the recent Aditya Dhar-directed blockbuster Dhurandar (2025), whose sequel is set to release in the near future as well, find themselves making similar defences about the cinematography and “treatment of the film, as the chairperson of the Feature Film Jury of National Awards, Ashutosh Gowariker made about The Kerala Story.
Unwittingly, these defences point to important techniques that conflate fact with fiction in insidious ways. Dhar’s film reverses Gupta’s “code-name” trope by its portrayal of an Indian spy protagonist infiltrating the Karachi underworld, revealing how the state is complicit in terrorism. In most of the scenes shot in Pakistan, it looks as if the film reel has been dipped in charcoal—the light is gritty, and grimy; similar to Hollywood’s use of sickly-ochre tints while showing third world cities.
In a scene that references the 2008 terrorist attack on the Taj Hotel and other locations in Mumbai, the director intercuts “actual recordings between handlers, terrorists and hostages”, transforming them into visuals of melodramatic war cries and sadistic chants in an orgy of Muslim villainy. In proper documentary film style, a red card covers the screen, displaying text from the purported recordings. This portrayal is devastating, especially because the audience is manipulated into siding with the damaged protagonist—a criminal who has been recruited by the state in an espionage operation. The director is clearly playing fast and loose with facts. We are reminded of Riefenstahl, but also Eisenstein, who demonstrated the miraculous power of editing through iconic “propaganda” sequences.
If the Assam CM represents that angry audience member who gets emotional while seeing his countrymen suffer, then his alleged “fearlessness” and “courage” seem almost justified. In this charged, emotional environment, the recent controversy around Sriram Raghavan’s Ikkis only serves the narrative of fragility and angst that is harboured by ruling political entities with fascist and controlling designs.
Some commentators are now calling this the “Dhurandar effect”. An incident portrayed in the darkness of theatres, where the individual is lost in a crowd, quickly becomes truth. Ikkis, which did not do well, perhaps because of its sensitive portrayal of characters and its refusal to polarise and provide answers, choosing the depth of gray over black-and-white condemnations, was in the limelight for all the wrong reasons. Many noticed the mismatch between end-credit messaging (which clearly seemed forced) and the humane portrayals of Pakistani characters in the entire run-time of the film.
The disclaimer denies the sensitive handling of a Pakistani Brigadier character, saying that there is little truth to the film’s narrative claim. This is an “exceptional incident” and on the whole, “our neighbouring country is not trustworthy at all”. While Raghavan did not directly comment on the “disclaimer”, he has gone on record to talk about the deep research, actual information, and army vetting that went into the making. It is ironic that in this case, the director had to go to such pains to talk about the “truth” of this story because it doesn’t align with the ruling party’s violent narrative of “wiping out the enemy from the map”.
Assam CM Himanta Biswa Sarma and the Language of Predatory Nationalism
The Sapir-Wharf hypothesis claims that language goes beyond mere expression to shape thought and culture. We see this in our films, where popular slogans and memes enter everyday colloquial language. The famous “How’s the Josh” dialogue used by the protagonist in Dhar’s earlier film, Uri (2019), is all around us, on memes, T-shirts, and other merchandise.
The Assam BJP handle tapped into this transformative power of language when it captioned its video “Point Blank Shot”. After a brief shot of a sharp-shooter dressed in cowboy attire, phrases such as “foreigner-free Assam”, “no mercy”, “why did you not go to Pakistan?” and “there is no forgiveness to Bangladeshis” flash on the screen. The video uses all the trademark cinematic techniques of plotting outlined in this article.
Assam CM Sharma is framed in a firing range as he takes aim and shoots. His bullet surges in a graphic animation, and then a red bulls-eye covers the screen, intercut into images on the wall with AI-generated stereotypical Muslim figures, sporting a skull-cap and a beard. The symbolism is unmissable.
In fact, the video ceases to be “symbolic” with the CM’s bloodlust affirming the clear message of hatred. This “call-to-action” was deleted soon after, perhaps as soon as the first signs of criticism surfaced. There is no way of ascertaining the claim that the creators expected controversy, but decided to still share the video since it would give their supporters enough time to spread the polemical message. In fact, the video has spread, and it is easy to gain access to it, even now.
The centre has been dragging its feet, distancing itself in the immediate aftermath, choosing not to comment directly or even apologising. But, even if the medium is compromised, the message from the “Assam Pradesh” BJP leadership to Bangladeshi Muslims is quite clear—What are you still doing here? If you insist on staying on, you will be harassed until you give in. If you resist, you will be targeted with a “point- blank shot”.
