​Reining in a bigot: on the Assam Chief Minister’s incendiary rhetoric Politics & News

Assam is among the States scheduled to hold Assembly elections in the months ahead. The northeastern State is also one of India’s laggards in many critical socio-economic markers — its HDI, per capita income, gainful industrial employment numbers, and enrolment rates in higher education are lower than the national average, while it has many poor health indicators. Any political leadership of such a State would face a clear and fundamental choice in governance. One path would be to identify systemic lacunae and bridge gaps in health, education, income and employment for every citizen, earning the goodwill of the electorate and seeking continuation in office on the strength of performance. The alternative path is more insidious — the creation of bogeymen through imaginary enemies and the stereotyping of entire communities. By doing so, demagogues seek to bypass the hard work of governance, inciting the electorate through polarisation and ensuring that political discourse remains mired in communal division. Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma of the BJP has chosen the latter path, deploying incendiary rhetoric that targets the Bengali-origin Muslim community, framing it as a “demographic threat” and a “matter of life and death” for the indigenous population, and escalating to what can be described as calls for economic persecution — urging citizens to underpay Muslim rickshaw-pullers so that “they suffer” and “leave Assam”. He has accused the community of “fertilizer jihad”, blamed them for urban floods, and coined a lexicon of manufactured hatreds, all of it in pursuit of what H.L. Mencken once described as the cynical art of politics “to keep the populace alarmed… by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”.

In the CPI(M)/CPI’s petition filed in the Supreme Court, Mr. Sarma’s statements have been documented to demonstrate not isolated political rhetoric but a sustained pattern of communal targeting that is politically distasteful and constitutionally unlawful. As the petition rightly argues, his statements deserve scrutiny from two lenses. First, the constitutional framework that concerns the Chief Minister’s oath of office, fundamental rights of all citizens and the Preamble’s guarantees of secularism and fraternity. Second, that these statements are liable to prosecution on offences under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and the Representation of the People Act. The Court has through its cumulative effect doctrine, in Amish Devgan and Tehseen Poonawalla, suggested that a CM’s speeches carry the weight of the State’s authority which makes communally polarising language in them even more damaging as it is used by someone who controls the police apparatus. The Court should not dismiss it as an election-eve political manoeuvre, and recognise it for what it is — a test of whether its own directions on hate speech carry any meaning when the offender holds the highest office in a State.