E-Paper
‘Point-blank murder of minorities’: Opposition criticises BJP post featuring Himanta Sarma
Congress' KC Venugopal said this is not an innocuous video to be ignored as troll content, but as “poison being spread from the very top”.
Guwahati : The Opposition on Sunday strongly criticised the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Assam over a now-deleted social media post featuring an AI-generated video of chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, alleging that the clip shows the “targeted point-blank murder of minorities”.
The video, posted on Saturday on the X handle of BJP’s Assam unit with the caption “point blank shot”, showed Sarma taking aim with a rifle and firing a shot at a photo of two individuals, both wearing a skull cap.
The video also included a photo of Sarma with text saying, “Identity, land and roots come first; Why did you go to Pakistan; No forgiveness for Bangladeshis”.
Slamming the video, the Congress, in a post on X, said: “The BJP’s official Assam Pradesh handle posted a video that appears to glorify the targeted, ‘point-blank’ murder of minorities. It is deeply abhorrent and disturbing and cannot be dismissed as random troll content. This amounts to a call to mass violence and genocide.”
Congress general secretary KC Venugopal, meanwhile, said this is not an innocuous video to be ignored as troll content, but as “poison being spread from the very top”, and there must be consequences for this.
“This is nothing but a call to genocide - a dream this fascist regime has harboured for decades,” the Congress leader said on X.
The CPI(M) also criticised the post, saying the video “amounts to an open call for ethnic cleansing and genocide”. “The Chief Minister must be put behind bars before a catastrophe unfolds in Assam. The Supreme Court should immediately take strict action against him and his coterie for vitiating communal harmony, creating enmity between communities, and publicly calling for violence,” the party said on X.
When asked about the post, BJP Assam media department convener Rupan Goswami said, “have not seen the said video, therefore it would not be possible for me to comment on it.”
HT reached out to state president Dilip Saikia and the party’s chief spokesperson in Assam Kishore Upadhyay, but did not receive a response till the time of going to print.
