Indian state’s CM calls for removal of Muslim voters
Remarks by Assam chief minister spotlight fears of voter suppression targeting Bengali-origin Muslims in India’s northeast ahead of roll revisions
NEW DELHI, India (MNTV) — A senior leader of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has openly called for the removal of up to half a million Muslim voters from electoral rolls, declaring that it is his responsibility to make the targeted community “suffer.”
Himanta Biswa Sarma, the chief minister of Assam — a northeastern Indian state bordering Bangladesh — said authorities were preparing to delete between 400,000 and 500,000 voters belonging to the Muslim community during upcoming revisions of voter lists.
He added that the group should not be allowed to vote in Assam at all and should instead vote in Bangladesh. Sarma made the remarks while speaking to reporters on the sidelines of a government event in Digboi, a town in Assam’s Tinsukia district, an area close to the international border and central to long-running political disputes over migration and citizenship.
The chief minister repeatedly used the term “Miya” for Muslims, which is widely recognized as a slur for Bengali-speaking Muslims in Assam.
The community is frequently portrayed by Hindu nationalist and Assamese ethno-nationalist groups as undocumented migrants from Bangladesh, despite many families having lived in India for generations and possessing citizenship documents.
Sarma explicitly framed voter disenfranchisement as a political strategy, describing it as “vote theft” and stating that his government was actively working to prevent Miya Muslims from voting.
He said administrative arrangements were already in place and that larger deletions would follow once intensified voter revisions begin.
The chief minister went further by urging social and economic discrimination against the community, suggesting that people should deliberately underpay Muslim workers.
He cited everyday examples, saying that if a rickshaw fare was five rupees, people should pay only four — remarks that analysts describe as a call for informal economic punishment based on religious identity.
Assam is not among the Indian states currently undergoing a nationwide “special intensive revision” of electoral rolls by the Election Commission. Instead, the poll body is conducting a separate “special revision” in the state, a process usually meant for routine updates.
However, Sarma has publicly acknowledged that notices linked to the revision have been served almost exclusively to Miya Muslims, stating on multiple occasions that authorities were “giving them trouble.”
Opposition figures warned that the statements represent a direct assault on constitutional protections. Congress leader Aman Wadud said Sarma had rendered the Constitution “absolutely ineffective” in Assam by openly advocating voter exclusion and collective punishment on religious grounds.
Assam has been a focal point of India’s citizenship crisis in recent years, particularly after the National Register of Citizens excluded nearly two million residents, a large proportion of them Muslims, triggering international concern over statelessness and discrimination.
Sarma, one of the most prominent Hindutva leaders in Modi’s party, has repeatedly defended aggressive measures targeting Muslims as necessary for protecting the state’s future.
Rights advocates and analysts warn that such rhetoric — coming from a sitting chief minister — risks normalizing voter suppression, economic exclusion and religious discrimination within India’s electoral system.
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