Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma openly acknowledged on Saturday that the state's electoral roll revision exercise selectively targets Bengali-speaking Muslims with voter deletion notices—and that the intent is to "give them trouble."
More than one million voters face deletion after a house-to-house verification exercise identified them for removal from electoral rolls, with the final list set for publication on February 10. But Sarma's admission reveals the discriminatory intent behind the numbers.
"Which Hindu has got notice? Which Assamese Muslim has got notice?" Sarma asked reporters, according to Maktoob Media. "Notices have been served to Miyas and such people. We are giving them trouble."
A billion people aren't a statistic—they're a billion stories. For the Bengali Muslim families in Assam now facing deletion from voter rolls, this isn't bureaucracy. It's systematic disenfranchisement with the Chief Minister's explicit blessing.
Sarma and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party have long labeled Bengali Muslims as "infiltrators" threatening indigenous Assamese interests. But rarely has the discriminatory intent been stated so baldly by a sitting Chief Minister.
The admission came as opposition parties filed police complaints on January 7, accusing the government of conspiring to delete genuine voters' names. Sarma indicated that notices, evictions, and police action were all being used as pressure tactics against the community.
"They have to understand that at some level, people of Assam are resisting them," he said—making clear that state power is being wielded to target citizens based on their religion and language.
The move echoes Assam's troubled history with the National Register of Citizens, which left 1.9 million people—many of them Bengali Muslims—off the citizenship list in 2019, creating a humanitarian crisis. Many were born in India but lacked the documents to prove ancestry dating back decades.
With elections approaching and Sarma openly admitting to using voter deletion as a weapon, the question isn't whether this violates democratic principles—it's whether India's election authorities and courts will intervene before a million citizens lose their right to vote.
