Assembly Elections 2026: How Himanta Biswa Sarma Became a Master of Polarisation

There is a particular irony in the identity of the man at the centre of this story. He’s an unlikely extremist. When Sarma was sworn in as Assam’s chief minister in May 2021, nobody could have pointed to an ideological biography that predicted what followed. He had served three consecutive terms in the legislature on a Congress ticket and had been a minister in the Tarun Gogoi government from 2006, holding portfolios ranging from health to finance to agriculture. He had no deep roots in the RSS, no formative years in the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, no history of Hindutva agitation. By the measure of the movement he eventually joined, he was a latecomer.

And yet, since defecting to the BJP in 2015, his rhetoric has regularly outpaced that of many politicians with lifelong Sangh Parivar roots. India Hate Lab reports consistently rank Sarma among India’s most prolific hate speech perpetrators, alongside Yogi Adityanath and Pushkar Singh Dhami, leaders with deep Hindutva pedigrees he lacks. Adityanath grew up steeped in militant Hindu nationalism, while Dhami brings decades of RSS ties. Sarma, arriving from Congress, came from the opposite direction entirely, and has produced more targeted attacks, from “jihad” variants to demographic alarms, more sustained anti-Muslim rhetoric than either of them.

The convert’s zeal

Harsh Mander, founder of the Karwan-e-Mohabbat solidarity campaign, calls this the “loyalty of a new convert,” a phenomenon in which a politician newly aligned with an ideological movement demonstrates heightened zeal to prove belonging. In January 2026, Mander filed a police complaint alleging hate speech by Sarma. The chief minister responded by saying he would file “at least 100 cases” in return. 

In the state assembly, when questioned about his rankly discriminatory policies, Sarma declaims, “I will take sides, what can you do? Won’t let ‘Miya’ Muslims take over Assam.” 

According to Mander, in Sarma’s case, the “Miya Muslim” has been constructed as an enemy, and the Chief Minister’s speeches have grown progressively more vitriolic since he assumed power. Such rhetoric may be part of a strategy to position himself for higher office, including a possible national role in 2029. By constructing a clear “enemy,” these speeches consolidate votes among certain groups, a strategy that, in other contexts, has shown measurable electoral dividends in the short and medium term.

On March 12, Sarma said at a media event what would have been unthinkable from any sitting chief minister: he would repost a video showing himself firing at skull-capped men. The original, shared by the BJP’s Assam unit on February 7, had merged real footage of Sarma handling rifles with AI-generated images of Muslims as targets and was deleted after a public uproar. On-screen text blared: “Foreigner free Assam,” “No mercy,” “Why did you not go to Pakistan?” and “There is no forgiveness to Bangladeshis.”

Congress and the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen filed police complaints. The Communist Party of India and CPI (Marxist) went to the Supreme Court. Even the BJP’s own Assam unit president called it “unauthorised” and “immature.” A party social media official was sacked.

A month later, Sarma announced its return from his personal account, with a label change: “So that Bangladeshis don’t infiltrate into Assam, the Assam chief minister will have to shoot at them, symbolically,” he said. The word “symbolically” does a lot of work; it cannot obscure the fact that a sitting chief minister, with a state election looming, announced a video depicting himself firing at a religious minority as an “administrative correction.”

Over these years, Assam is defined by a single, constructed enemy, steering the state’s politics.

Setting Stage for the ‘Jihad’ Narrative

Within weeks of taking office, Sarma began reaching for the vocabulary of “demographic invasion” to frame Bengali-speaking Muslim migration, much of it spanning three or four generations, as a civilisational assault on indigenous Assamese identity.

Most Miyas in Assam are not recent arrivals or infiltrators. They are the descendants of people who moved from East Bengal in the early decades of the twentieth century, encouraged by colonial administrators and Assamese landlords, to settle wastelands and riverine islands and convert them into paddy fields. This happened before Partition, before Bangladesh existed as a country. These communities integrated, and the 1961 Census Commissioner recorded their declared aspiration to be absorbed into Assamese culture.

If there is a single word that defines the Sarma political vocabulary, it is “jihad.” Over five years in office, he has applied the label with remarkable creativity, attaching it to an ever-expanding list of activities by Bengali-origin Muslims.

“People from Bangladesh come to Assam and create a threat to our civilisation and culture. I have closed 600 madrassas, and I intend to close all madrassas because we do not want madrassas. We want schools, colleges and universities,” he said. At an RSS event in Delhi, he declared: “The word ‘madrassa’ should disappear. Teach the Quran at home, but children should be taught science and math in school”.

In July 2023 came “love jihad.” Following a high-profile murder case involving a Hindu woman and a Muslim man, Sarma told a public gathering: “Love and jihad do not gel. Don’t cross the Laxman Rekha by marrying outside your faith.”

Assam had passed no law on the subject, and Sarma’s comments operated at a level more potent than legislation. The inventive use of ‘jihad’ continued into 2024 with natural disasters.

In August 2024, “flood jihad” arrived when Guwahati suffered severe monsoon flooding. Sarma bypassed questions about his government’s failure to manage urban drainage and instead accused the University of Science and Technology Meghalaya (USTM), whose owner Mahbubul Hoque is a Bengali-origin Muslim from Karimganj, of deliberately causing the disaster through hill-cutting. 

“I think the USTM owner has started a jihad,” he said. “We talk about land jihad. He has started flood jihad against Assam.  Otherwise, no one can cut hills in such a ruthless way. No one who loves nature, especially an education institution, can cut it in this way. I have to call it a jihad… I believe it is deliberate. Otherwise, they can call an architect and make a building even while keeping the hills and trees. They can make drainage… They have not used any architect. Just using bulldozers, they have relentlessly cut the land,” he said.

He called for a public boycott, then moved to derecognise the institution altogether. The university had an NAAC “A” grade accreditation, and was among the top 200 institutions in the Education Ministry’s National Institutional Ranking Framework for 2024, the only private university from the Northeast to make the list. None of this entered the conversation.

“Fertiliser jihad” followed shortly after, Sarma’s allegation that Bengali Muslim fish producers were deliberately overusing urea in their ponds to cause kidney disease in Assamese consumers, accompanied by a public call to boycott their produce.  At a program on natural farming, in Guwahati, he said: “We have conveyed our resolve to fight against ‘fertiliser jihad’ during our election campaign. We should use fertiliser but excess of it can harm the body.” Fish, a staple in the Assamese diet, is significantly production in Nagaon, Morigaon, and Cachar, areas with significant role of Muslim entrepreneurs. Sarma appealed to people to avoid buying fish produced by ‘Miya Muslim’ fish producers as the use urea fertilizer to produce fish.

The Language Sheds Its Cover

In December, Sarma said that if Muslims crossed 50 per cent of the population, “others won’t remain”, a formulation that stops just short of calling for prevention but leaves the inference hanging in the air. He used the term “Miya Musalmaan,”, and suggested Assam could “automatically become part of Bangladesh” if demographic trends continued. 

Same month, he turned to reproduction, urging Hindu families: “Every Hindu person should not stop at one child. Give birth to at least two, otherwise there will be no one to look after the house.” He said, without hedging: “Miyas will face trouble till I remain CM.” 

Asked to retract the remark, he refused. He then instructed the people of Assam to actively make Miya lives uncomfortable. “Earlier, people were scared. Now I myself am encouraging people to keep giving troubles,” he said. He offered specific methods: in a rickshaw, if the fare is five rupees, pay four. Call them in the middle of the night.  “Only if they face troubles will they leave Assam.” 

His government simultaneously announced a policy of arms licences for so-called “original inhabitants” in remote areas. When asked if this risked turning Assam explosive, his answer was: “I want the situation in Assam to be explosive.”

He also announced that the quasi-judicial Foreigners’ Tribunals would henceforth hear only cases against Muslims, while proceedings against Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Christians, Parsis, Jains, Gorkhas, and Rajbongshis would be dropped. He told BJP members to file Form 7 applications, the form used to seek deletion from electoral rolls, specifically targeting Miya voters. “There is nothing to hide about this,” he said. 

“This will keep the Miyas under continuous pressure.” He announced that between four and five lakh Miya voters would be removed from the rolls, a statement of doubtful legality, since the authority to delete voters rests entirely with the Election Commission.

‘Fissiparous Tendencies’

In February 2026, the Gauhati High Court heard consolidated public interest petitions against Sarma, filed by Congress leaders, the CPI(M), and Assamese public intellectual Dr Hiren Gohain, among others. 

Senior advocates Abhishek Manu Singhvi, Chander Uday Singh, and Meenakshi Arora argued that the statements collectively formed a “habitual pattern of incitement” incompatible with the constitutional obligations of a chief minister. The Division Bench noted that several statements appeared to display what it termed a “fissiparous tendency”, language with the capacity to deepen social fractures. Notices went to the Union government, the state government, and the Director General of Police. The next hearing is April 21.

Sanjib Baruah, professor emeritus of political studies at Bard College, New York, in Outlook, has called the pattern a “worrying trend,”. He notes that “illegality is now associated with a particular ethnic community. It is no longer a matter of the actual citizenship status of an individual.” 

Analysts who track Sarma’s trajectory suggest the rhetoric serves a purpose beyond the immediate electoral cycle. By constructing a clear and recurring enemy, demographically threatening, culturally alien, perpetually conspiring, Sarma has built a political identity that travels well beyond Assam. He has campaigned in Jharkhand on the same themes. He has addressed RSS events in Delhi. He is widely regarded as positioning himself for a national role. The “Miya Muslim enemy” has been useful in Guwahati, and also proved portable.