A now-deleted video generated by artificial intelligence and shared by India’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Assam state, home to more than 12 million Muslims, has been widely condemned after it showed the northeastern state’s chief minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma, appearing to shoot at Muslims.
The 17-second clip shared on X and titled “point blank shot” circulated widely on social media on Saturday before being removed after public outrage and criticism from opposition politicians.
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The video appeared to combine original footage of Sarma handling a rifle and AI-generated images showing him shooting at two Muslim men under the title “No Mercy”. Sarma has been accused of running xenophobic campaigns against Muslims, who form one-third of the state’s population, before state elections expected in March or April.
The video also included images of Sarma dressed as a cowboy and pointing a pistol, overlaid with text such as “Foreigner free Assam”.
The Assam BJP unit accused of producing anti-Muslim rhetoric has not officially commented.
“There is no comment. It has been deleted. There is nothing to say,” Ranjib Kumar Sarma, a local BJP leader in Assam, told Indian Express.
The chief minister has recently escalated his rhetoric against Muslims, particularly against Muslims of Bengali origin in Assam, linking them to crime and demographic change.
Last month, he called on Assam residents to give “Miya Muslims”, a derogatory term for Bengali-speaking Muslims, a “hard time”.
“Even small acts, such as paying less fare in a rickshaw. If they ask 5 rupees [6 United States cents], give 4 rupees [4 cents]. They will leave Assam only if they face hardships,” he said.
Only the federally run territories of India-administered Kashmir in the north and the Lakshadweep islands in the Arabian Sea have a higher Muslim percentage of the population than Assam.
‘No basic decency’
Aman Wadud, an Assam-based leader from the opposition Indian National Congress party, called the video “deeply disturbing”.
“BJP has proven time and again that it has absolutely no regard for law or even basic decency,” he told Al Jazeera.
“This also shows desperation of BJP. They are losing the plot in Assam. The wise people of Assam are ready to defeat this politics of hatred and division,” he added.
In a statement, Congress said the video “amounts to a call to mass violence and genocide”.
All India Trinamool Congress leader Mahua Moitra urged India’s Supreme and High Court judges to take notice of the Sarma video, asking in a post on X “what more this man needs to do” for the judiciary to “wake up”.
In September, the BJP in Assam posted another AI-generated video titled “Assam without BJP”, depicting the state taken over by Muslims, whom it paints as “illegal immigrants”.
The rise in anti-Muslim bigotry in Assam comes against the backdrop of a BJP culture war against Muslims, who make up 14 per cent of India’s 1.4 billion people.
According to Hindu-majoritarian ideology, which guides the ruling BJP, Muslims are considered outsiders. Muslim asylum seekers and refugees from Bangladesh and Myanmar are in particular targeted as “infiltrators”. India also amended its citizenship laws in 2019, making faith a basis for acquiring citizenship in the officially secular nation. Muslims were excluded from applying.
Since the election of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014, dozens of Muslims have been lynched on suspicion of consuming beef or transporting cattle, which are considered sacred by some Hindus. Muslims have faced discrimination in employment and education for decades, but under the BJP government, their plight has worsened as Hindu nationalist parties have weaponised laws against Muslims.
Human rights groups said hate speech and violence against Muslims have exploded in recent years.
Last month, research by the India Hate Lab, a project of the Washington, DC-based Center for the Study of Organized Hate, found that the country had recorded 1,318 hate speech events in 2025, an average of more than three per day.
At least 98 per cent of the events targeted Muslims and explicitly so in 1,156 cases, the report added.
Modi himself has been accused of using inflammatory language about Muslims to generate fear among Hindu voters. Human Rights Watch said in a report published in August 2024 that Modi and several party leaders “frequently used hate speech against Muslims and other minorities, inciting discrimination, hostility, and violence” during campaigning for the 2024 general election.
Modi was denied a US visa for links to a 2002 anti-Muslim massacre in the state of Gujarat while he was serving as its chief minister. More than 1,000 people were killed, most of them Muslims, in some of the worst anti-Muslim violence since India’s independence from British colonial rule in 1947. Since becoming prime minister, however, Modi has visited the US numerous times.