As Assam’s 2026 assembly election approaches, Himanta Biswa Sarma, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and chief minister of the Indian state, has been deploying rhetoric described by his political opponents – and not without reason – as “genocidal”. On 9 February, the Assam wing of the BJP posted on X a video edited to suggest Sarma shooting at two visibly Muslim men, while slogans such as “No mercy” and “Foreigner free Assam” played across the screen. That video was deleted after widespread criticism, but Sarma’s rhetoric in recent months has been in keeping with its incendiary messaging. On 27 January, at a press conference, Sarma said he encouraged “troubling Miyas” in order to drive them from Assam. “We are not hiding anything. We directly say that we are against Miyas.” he said, indirectly inciting social discrimination, including an informal social and economic boycott against Bengali Muslims.
Sarma has become a key political actor in Assam and across India’s Northeast for the BJP , and is often described as the party’s “key strategist” in the region. His words carry weight, particularly as the BJP is poised to dominate Assam once again after the assembly election, slated to start in March. When a journalist asked whether his government was polarising Assam during the 27 January press conference, Sarma’s response was alarming: “Assam is a polarised society”, he said, and “for the next thirty years, we have to practice politics of polarisation if you want to live.”
Sarma’s targets are obvious: Assam’s Bengali Muslim minority. Here, his hate speech forms part of a tried-and-tested strategy of sectarian polarisation that the BJP has deployed across India, and which it doubles down on when it falls short on its promises to voters beyond the realm of xenophobia. Sarma has claimed that Assam’s economic fortunes have risen under his watch since 2021, boasting of it as the “fastest-growing state” in India, citing data from the Reserve Bank of India between 2020 and 2025. The state’s Economic Survey report for 2024-2025 reports a more modest year on year growth of 12.74 percent. These figures are just papering over the endemic economic hardship confronting the residents of one of India’s poorest states. This is starkly illustrated by the fact that 980,000 educated youth were looking for jobs in Assam according to the state’s 2023-2024 Economic Survey; meanwhile, only 145,000 government jobs have reportedly been filled since 2021.
In 2025, the Assam state government held Advantage Assam 2.0, the second iteration of its mega investment summit, which brought in investment pledges of INR 5.18 trillion (over USD 56 billion). After its first iteration, in 2018, only about half of the promised investment ever materialised, and even that came largely from existing Public Sector Undertakings – enterprises where the Indian government, also under the BJP, holds controlling stake. There is little to indicate that the second edition will bring significantly different outcomes.