Guwahati: After coming under fire over a now-deleted video, on its official social media handle, showing chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma training a gun on two AI-generated figures with skullcaps and beards, the Assam BJP is now attempting damage control.
Not only has the video been called “immature” and “unauthorised”, the state unit of the party has also removed one of the four co-conveners of the social media department as part of its crisis management effort.
Assam BJP president Dilip Saikia confirmed this to The Indian Express and directly blamed the now removed co-convener for the post.
According to the newspaper, Saikia appointed four party workers as co-conveners of the social media department in August 2025, keeping the Assembly elections in the state in mind. All of them were in their twenties and thirties. The social media team also comprises 20 members at the state level, a convener, two co-conveners and five members in every district. The convener is a 33-year-old party worker, Biswajit Khound.
On Saturday, the video, with the caption “Point blank shot” was uploaded. It showed an image of Sarma shooting 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,” Saikia said.
Content is created and posted on social media by a team of party workers who work as volunteers, Khound said. “There is no private agency involved; our graphic designer is also a karyakarta. Everything operates under the party department,” he said.
The co-conveners have the authority to upload posts themselves on routine matters such as party programmes and greetings, Saikia said.
“But he is not authorised to put up sensitive material, that too using the image of the chief minister out-of-context, without permission from the in-charge Ranjib Sarma or from the Chief Minister’s office. This post was not vetted by the concerned authorities,” he claimed.
Sarma has also denied knowledge of the video before it went viral. “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.
