Assam BJP Removes Social Media Member Over Unauthorized Video Targeting Bangladeshis

A key member of Assam BJP’s social media department was removed from his position over an “unauthorised” video posted from the unit’s official X handle last week that showed an image of Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma purportedly taking aim with a rifle and firing a shot at two people, one wearing a skull cap and the other with a beard, with “point-blank shot” as the caption. The now-deleted video had invited backlash from across the political spectrum, with Congress leaders filing a police complaint over the same issue. Assam BJP president Dilip Saikia called the post by the co-convener an “immature” and “unauthorised” action. The 33-year-old co-convener of the social media department who was removed from his position was among the four part workers appointed to the post in August 2025. The social media team of the Assam BJP comprises 20 members at the state level, a convener, two co-conveners and five members in every district, reported the Indian Express. The now-deleted AI-generated video, uploaded last Saturday with the caption “Point blank shot”, showed an image of Sarma firing at a photograph of the two men, and ends with an image of him dressed like a cowboy and wielding a gun, superimposed with phrases such as “No mercy to Bangladeshis”, “Why did you go to Pakistan?” and “Foreigner-free Assam.” “The party is concerned about illegal immigrant Bangladeshis in Assam, and for that, there has to be a movement in the society. But the party does not support the idea of a mala fide intent of targeting Muslims with bullets. It was mishandled by an immature and unauthorised person; the party took note, and we got the video deleted,” claimed Saikia according to the Indian Express report. Khound, who was removed as co-convener of the social media department, is learnt to have said tha the content is created and posted on social media by a team of party workers who work as volunteers. “There is no private agency involved; our graphic designer is also a karyakarta. Everything operates under the party department,” he was quoted as saying in the report. Saikia said that while the co-conveners have the “authority to upload posts themselves on routine matters” such as party programmes and greetings, they are not “authorised” to put up sensitive material. This post, he claimed, was not “vetted by the concerned authorities”. Chief Minister Sarma, too, claimed to have no knowledge of the video. “We have registered an FIR (on the basis of a complaint by Congress MLAs). In fact, one of our BJP people has also filed a case, saying that this is a video about which we are angry because in Assam, everybody knows that we are not against Assamese Muslims. We are against Bangladeshi Muslims, whom we call Miya Muslims. That photograph should have made the differences between Bangladeshi Muslims and Indian Muslims. BJP as a party and I as a human being do not support anything that goes against the Assamese Muslim community,” he said. This is not the first time that the BJP Assam has faced flak on X. In September last year, the party’s social media team had posted an AI-generated video with the text ‘Assam without BJP’. It showed images of a man in a skull-cap cutting meat by the road with the text ‘beef legalisation’, and of men in skullcaps and women in burkhas and hijabs in different locations such as tea gardens, the airport, in an amusement park and a stadium in Guwahati, and walking across a border fence in lines with the text ‘illegal immigrants’. The following month, the Supreme Court issued a notice on a plea seeking directions to X and the official handle of Assam BJP to take down that video.