Editorial: No checks on Himanta’s hate

Among the chief ministers of BJP-ruled states, Himanta Biswa Sarma of Assam stands out as the busiest motormouth and the one with the most acidic speech. He has single-handedly turned the current election season into the most hate-filled campaign ever, relentlessly targeting Muslims by name and explicit pejoration. With the Election Commission of India (ECI) seeing no need to censure his speech and the Supreme Court washing its hands of the matter, the Assam electorate is going into the April 9 vote more polarised than ever before. The partisan ECI has allowed this to happen because that was exactly what the BJP wanted.

Throughout the campaign, Sarma has given free rein to this tongue and announced his ill intentions as the agenda for the next term. His preferred word for Muslims is ‘miya,’ a street usage with a derogatory sense. Over and over, at public rallies and official events, he has declared “my job is to make the miya people suffer,” and to “break the backbone of the miyas.”

Furthermore, speaking as chief minister as well as election campaigner, he has canvassed for an economic boycott of Muslims, which, had the referee been a fair one, would have ensured his disqualification right there. At one official event, he urged reporters, “If a miya rickshaw puller asks for Rs 5, give him only Rs 4”.

Then, crossing all red lines, but not the limits of ECI’s tolerance, his image was used in a video shared by the Assam BJP’s social media handle, depicting him firing a gun at two Muslim men with captions reading "No mercy".

In the final stretch of the campaign, Sarma descended to attacking the diet of rivals — including a woman half his age, Kunki Chowdhury, who is a candidate for the Assam Jatiya Parishad, a Congress ally. Showing neither decency nor gravitas, the chief minister displayed a photo of Chowdhury’s mother purportedly consuming beef. Speaking like a classroom snitch or a soap opera mother-in-law, he bleated, "The girl’s parents not only eat beef, they also show it to the public! Cow is our mother!"

Unfortunately, hate speech has become normalised in Indian elections, and Himanta Sarma’s poisonous pitch is only seen as rhetoric, not real intent. Analysts explain that since Muslims comprise 34% of Assam’s population and the BJP’s main electoral tactic is polarisation, Sarma perforce has to take recourse to extreme invective to retain his Hindu vote. Normal service will resume once the elections are over. This is a dangerous indulgence. There is no evidence for the supposition that a candidate once elected by cleaving the electorate will go on to be the chief minister of the entirety of it. We have, in fact, a ton of evidence from multiple locations for exactly the opposite proposition. The BJP’s Sankalp Patra for this election explicitly promises a number of laws targeting Muslims, including one to bring about a Uniform Civil Code, another to outlaw interfaith marriage, making even the parents of Muslim men liable, and yet another to impose harsh regulations on Muslim ownership of land.

Fairly early in this campaign, 188 academics and lawyers red-flagged Himanta’s campaign pitch, stating that it falls close to the UN definition of ethnic cleansing. But such alarms have not deterred Sarma nor nudged awake the ECI. If the voters do not stop this at the final checkpost, this institution would have to cop the blame betraying its charge yet again.