BJP Assam’s Social Media Videos Herald a New Age of AI-Generated Hate

On 16 September, the official X page of Bharatiya Janata Party’s Assam wing posted an AI-generated video depicting Muslim men and women going about their day at various locations in the state, including an amusement park, historical monument, and cricket stadium. The obscene, communally-loaded video is accompanied by two captions that read “We can’t let this dream of Paaijaan to be true!!” and “Assam Without BJP”. Here, 'Paaijaan' is a devious wordplay on 'Bhaijaan,' a term used by South Asian Muslims to fondly refer to their brothers or male friends. In this specific context, the BJP Assam page has been using 'Paijaan' as a portmanteau between 'Bhaijaan' and 'Pakistan' to refer to the Congress party’s Assam President, Gaurav Gogoi, and his alleged links to Pakistan through his British wife (the Assam government has even set up a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe these alleged links).In fact, the latest video is just one in a series of several pieces of communally-charged and potentially slanderous visual content that the BJP Assam page has posted in recent weeks targeting Gogoi.Assam’s Persecution of Journalists Signals a Dangerous New EraOn 16 September, it posted a picture of Gogoi appearing sad following the defeat of Pakistan in the recent India-Pakistan Asia Cup cricket match in Dubai. Two days earlier, it had posted an AI-generated video of Gogoi talking to Pakistani army chief, Asif Munir, about a supposed mole in the Pakistani intelligence agency, ISI, who had leaked the Congress leader’s alleged cross-border links to the Assam government. On 12 September, the page posted an AI-generated video of Gogoi talking to an unidentified individual – perhaps a visa agent – to arrange for ‘duplicate certificates’ for Bangladeshis to illegally cross the border into India. It builds on a dominant belief among BJP supporters in Assam that Congress leaders allegedly facilitate the entry of ‘illegal migrants’ from Bangladesh to bolster the party’s vote banks. The video is accompanied by the caption:“Paaijaan’s dream to make Assam the land of Kanglus will never be fulfilled because Supermama @himantabiswa is the CM of the state.”Here, the use of the term ‘Kanglus’ is worth paying attention to. The page has used the term in several posts to refer to people—Bengali Muslims, specifically—that it considers to be ‘illegal Bangladeshis’. 'Kanglu’ is a stylised portmanteau of the words 'Kangaal' (‘poor’ or ‘destitute’ in Hindi, Bengali, Assamese and other Indo-Aryan languages) and 'Bangladesh.' The two words come together as 'Kangladesh' – a disparaging term used widely among Hindutva circles for Bangladesh. ‘Kangla’ or ‘Kanglu’ is a secondary derivative of ‘Kangladesh’.The slur has clear racial, classist, and even casteist undertones. It is a profane allusion to the inter-generational poverty of undocumented Bengali Muslim migrants who may come to India in search of menial work. More broadly, it is a verbal expression of what may be seen as Hindu India’s visceral disdain towards a Muslim-majority, post-Partition neighbour.Sample this perverse Facebook post by a pro-Hindutva account from December 2024 with some 7400 likes. It depicts an Arab Sheikh ordering a Bangladeshi child to clean his toilet – a conspicuously casteist jibe often deployed against Dalits in India. Language and visuals go hand in hand, and its important to consider both to understand how communal dehumanisation moves through the social landscape.While the BJP Assam’s videos and images may be seen as direct jibes at a particular opposition leader, they go far beyond the traditional boundaries of partisan politics. They villainise an entire community—Bengali Muslims—under the garb of routine political targeting. The latest video, in fact, ups the ante by explicitly framing the religious minority as a demographic, cultural, and political threat to Assam and the Assamese. This, in itself, is unsurprising in the context of Assamese politics. What is, perhaps, shocking is the brazenness and clarity with which the official page of a ruling party has done it.What’s notable is that it doesn’t depict Bengali Muslims—referred disparagingly as ‘Miya’ by the dominant Assamese community—as doing anything remotely criminal or alarming. It simply shows them quietly and happily going about their lives in different settings. Yet, the very image of Muslims inhabiting everyday spaces in Assam is projected as threatening to the ‘native’ population, or more specifically, the Hindu Assamese population. The alarmism here plays on the quotidian existence and visibility of the Miya in Assam’s public spaces, strategically blended with provocative sectarian tropes about Muslims, such as the popular imagery of slaughtering of beef in public (with which the video opens). How Bengali Muslims Are Invisibilised in Their Own LandSome may argue that the rhetoric in these videos target ‘illegal immigrants’ from Bangladesh, and not Bengali Muslims, who are citizens of India. In fact, senior minister in the Assam government, Pijush Hazarika, made that exact claim while resharing the video on his X profile. However, this is a clever sleight of hand. In Assam, the figure of the ‘illegal Bangladeshi’ is almost always a synonym for the Miya Muslim community as a whole. This is based on the long-held assumption among the Assamese political class, civil society and intelligentsia that the Bengali Muslims, unlike the ‘indigenous Assamese Muslims’, do not belong in Assam, and that their population has risen only because of illegal migration from across the border. In fact, the carefully curated images of the ‘Bengali Muslim’ and ‘illegal Bangladeshi’, based on how they look, how they dress, and what specific dialect of Bengali they speak, are deployed interchangeably in the dominant Assamese public discourse. The BJP knows this well and doesn’t hesitate to use the composite image in their propaganda to rouse communal passions among its loyal voters.A key feature of these AI-generated videos is that they use English and Hindi, rather than Assamese subtitles and voiceovers. This shows the Himanta Biswa Sarma government’s desire to reach a wider Hindutva electorate beyond Assam and in the process, insert itself into the center field of Hindu nationalist politics at a national level. In fact, through repeated acts of belligerence against religious minorities and political dissidents over the last few years, such as by relentlessly bulldozing Bengali Muslim homesteads and forcibly expelling members of the community to Bangladesh, it has already managed to capture the attention of a national audience that now sees Sarma as a leading enforcer of the Hindutva consensus.These videos also force us to ponder over the emergent relationship between generative AI and politics. They demonstrate how AI can be weaponised to visualise the deepest, darkest anxieties of a social majority to justify a larger project of majoritarian mobilisation. AI manifests what was so far confined to verbal iterations of political leaders or the psyche of the common people. It creates a new visual vocabulary of hate.In the specific case of Assam, the ruling party appears to be using these AI videos to probe what degree of communal polarisation is politically and legally permissible in the current context. The lack of any coherent response so far, including potential legal action, from the Assam Congress, against what amounts to libellous propaganda against its own senior leader, only contributes in raising the bar for hate speech, which these videos certainly fall under.Indeed, BJP Assam is perfecting a new form of on-the-nose sectarianism that is crude, unrepentant, and revolting even by the contemporary standards of communal politics in India. If unchallenged, this script will endure and become a permanent feature of Indian politics, perpetuating the unending nightmare for ethno-religious minorities. (The author is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Asian Studies jointly at the National University of Singapore and King’s College London.This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)

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BJP Assam’s Social Media Videos Herald a New Age of AI-Generated Hate

BJP Assam’s videos and images go far beyond the traditional boundaries of partisan politics.

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Topics: BJP Assam Himanta Biswa Sarma