The Blueprint for Marginalization: Decoding the Assam Model

In January 2026, at a press conference weeks before Assam went to the polls, chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma told a crowd that if an autorickshaw driver asked for five rupees, they should pay four instead. "Tho miyan kab jayega," he said — using a slur for Bengali-origin Muslims. "It is my job to trouble miyan Muslims." It was not a stray remark from a fringe figure. It came from an elected chief minister, a constitutional officeholder, speaking on the record. And it was not isolated: it was the most explicit expression yet of a pattern that has shaped Assam's politics, and India's, for decades.

A five-step blueprint

When a majority group in a society sets out to systematically weaken a minority, it rarely does so directly — the world is watching, and direct persecution invites international scrutiny. Instead, a blueprint unfolds in five steps, one that has become clearly visible in India over the past several decades.

The first step is to raise the question of citizenship: prove you belong here. Framed as a neutral administrative or legal matter, the demand is in practice directed at one community, and repeated relentlessly. The second step is to define local culture as indigenous in ethnic or religious terms — in India's case, to make "local" and "Hindu" synonymous, so that Muslims can never be fully local no matter how long their families have lived on the land. The third step follows automatically: if local means Hindu, then Muslims become outsiders by definition — infiltrators, Bangladeshis, participants in an imagined "population jihad" — regardless of whether they hold a voter card or appear in official citizenship rolls. The label is not applied once; it is repeated in every speech, every headline, every forwarded message, until it settles into how people think.

Once the narrative is in place, the fourth step weaponizes the law. The National Register of Citizens, Foreigners Tribunals, eviction drives and the demolition of institutions are all, officially, neutral processes applied to everyone — but in practice they fall on one community. The fifth and final step is social and economic boycott: don't buy from their shops, don't rent to them, don't do business with them. This step is normally kept unofficial. In Assam, the chief minister has said it openly, in press conferences.

The result of all five steps together is that an entire community spends its energy proving citizenship, defending land, fighting eviction notices and surviving daily harassment — while education, economic growth and political power become secondary. The resulting poverty then gets read back as evidence that the community was inferior to begin with.

A history longer than the accusation

To test whether this blueprint has actually played out in Assam, its history has to be established first. Documented evidence of a Muslim presence in the Kamrup region dates to 1205, when the military commander Muhammad Bakhtiyar Khilji arrived with his forces — guided, local accounts say, by an Ali Mech chief who later converted to Islam. By the 14th century there is evidence of settled religious life: the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta wrote of meeting a Sufi pir and his followers in Kamrup. Through the Ahom kingdom's centuries, Muslims arrived as soldiers, artisans, prisoners and administrators and were steadily absorbed into local society; after 1600 they fought alongside Ahom forces, spoke Assamese, and Sufi saints like Azan Fakir composed devotional songs in Assamese that shaped a distinct Ahomiya Muslim identity.

British land and revenue policy then reshaped migration into the Brahmaputra valley. During and after the two World Wars, colonial administrators deliberately recruited Bengali Muslim peasants under "Grow More Food" campaigns to farm the char lands — because no one else was cultivating them. The families now branded "illegal Bangladeshis" had ancestors the British state itself invited in, to build Assam's agrarian economy. It was state-sponsored settlement, not infiltration.

The 1920s Line System formalized which areas were reserved for locals and which could absorb migrant settlement. The 1947 Sylhet referendum sent much of that district into East Pakistan, later Bangladesh, turning long-settled populations into outsiders overnight in the eyes of a new international border. That anxiety fed into the Assam Movement and the 1985 Assam Accord, which fixed 24 March 1971 as the cutoff date for citizenship — meaning belonging was no longer a matter of history or community, but of a date on a form families displaced by flood and river erosion often could not document.

1983, 1992, and a shared playbook

Three national events converted a documentation problem into a mass-casualty one. Lakhs of refugees crossed into Assam after the 1971 Bangladesh war, a humanitarian crisis gradually reframed as a demographic threat. The 1979 Assam Movement, led by the All Assam Students Union, demanded identification of illegal immigrants — but on the ground, "illegal immigrant" and "Bengali Muslim" became functionally interchangeable. On 18 February 1983, in a matter of hours, over 2,000 Muslims were massacred at Nellie — independent India's largest post-Partition massacre. The Tiwari Commission was formed to investigate; its report has never been made public, more than forty years later.

The same years saw the Ram Janmabhoomi movement launch nationally, the locks on the Babri Masjid opened, and L.K. Advani's Rath Yatra spread communal polarization countrywide, culminating in the mosque's demolition on 6 December 1992 and over 2,000 deaths. The pattern in both cases was identical: narrative first, violence next, accountability never. Assam's "Bengali Muslim as Bangladeshi infiltrator" narrative and Hindutva's national "Muslim as civilizational threat" narrative developed separately through the 1980s but increasingly reinforced each other — the ideological foundation Himanta Biswa Sarma now stands on.

From narrative to law

Between 2015 and 2019, Assam's NRC was updated under Supreme Court oversight, with the same 24 March 1971 cutoff. On paper this sounds reasonable. On the ground, Assam floods regularly, rivers change course, char islands submerge, and records are lost with them — an obvious problem for a process that asks a family to produce a 1947 document. Digitization introduced its own spelling mismatches and clerical errors, with the burden of proof falling on applicants who had no control over them. More than 40 lakh people were excluded from the initial draft; roughly 19 lakh from the final one — including people who held voter IDs and land records.

Hasan Ali, an Assam resident excluded from the draft, attempted suicide under the pressure of repeated verification notices; his name was later restored, but he said he would do the same again if excluded a second time. Multiple such reports emerged between 2017 and 2019. For those excluded, the next stop is the Foreigners Tribunals — quasi-judicial bodies where, unlike ordinary courts, the burden of proof is reversed: you must prove you are a citizen, with limited legal aid, inconsistent rulings and costly, repeated hearings that push poor families deeper into debt.

The 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act made Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh eligible for citizenship — explicitly excluding Muslims, and formally linking citizenship to religion for the first time. In March 2026, Himanta Biswa Sarma announced that Foreigners Tribunals would now hear only Muslim cases, turning what the CAA implied into explicit state policy.

The everyday campaign

According to India Hate Lab data, Sarma delivered 36 hate speeches in 2024 alone. He blamed floods in Guwahati on a Muslim-run university with a NAAC A grade and a national top-200 ranking, saying its gates "looked like Mecca" — after which the university lost recognition. He accused Muslim fish farmers of deliberately over-fertilizing ponds with urea to cause kidney disease among Assamese people, a claim with zero scientific evidence, and called for a public boycott over it. In January 2026 he said his job was to trouble "miyan" people; weeks later he said explicitly that since he cannot deport them, he creates pressure so they leave on their own — a practice human rights discourse calls constructive expulsion, illegal in principle but, in Assam, openly stated state policy.

In September 2021, an eviction drive in Dhalpur, Darrang district — three months into Sarma's tenure as chief minister — left more than 1,000 families homeless; police firing killed two people, and video showed a government photographer jumping on the body of a man shot during the operation. The photographer was arrested; no one was held accountable for the eviction itself. In February 2026, the BJP's official X account posted an AI-generated video showing Sarma shooting Muslim figures, titled "Point Blank Shot"; it was deleted after backlash, but not before it had circulated.

What the data shows

The long-term effect of survival-mode citizenship is measurable. NITI Aayog's 2023 Multidimensional Poverty Index found that seven of Assam's ten poorest districts have Muslim populations above 50%. The Assam Human Development Report 2014 found that even after controlling for education, employment and housing, Muslim households were roughly 75% more likely to be poor than Hindu households — a gap NFHS data mirrors in child immunization and child mortality, where Assam is a national outlier: Muslim communities elsewhere in India tend to show better child-survival outcomes than this. The proximate cause is straightforward: a family fighting NRC paperwork, tribunal fees and eviction cannot simultaneously send children to school or build savings. It is not a cultural choice. It is a designed outcome.

Power without representation

Assam's first elected government in 1937, led by Muhammad Saadulla, shows Muslims were once a decisive political force, not merely voters. After independence, Muslim political participation ran almost entirely through the Congress party until the Assam Movement produced the All India United Democratic Front, which won 10 seats in 2006, 18 in 2011, 13 in 2016 and 16 in 2021 — representation that never converted into governance. In the 2021 election, a record 31 Muslim MLAs were elected, yet not one sat in the ruling alliance, the cabinet or any decision-making body — the first time in decades Muslims were entirely outside executive power.

In 2023, delimitation redrew constituency boundaries using the 2001 census, while keeping the total assembly seats fixed at 126. Muslim-majority constituencies fell from roughly 35 to 20. BJP had explicitly promised delimitation in its 2021 manifesto, with Sarma saying at least 110 seats should belong to "indigenous" people; after delimitation, senior minister Piyush Hazarika said outright that 104 seats were now reserved for "indigenous, Indian and Hindu" people. Notably, the 2001 census — when Muslims were 31% of Assam's population, versus 34.22% in 2011 — was used for Assam's delimitation, while the more recent 2011 census was used for Jammu and Kashmir's. Political analyst Yogendra Yadav called it communal gerrymandering: Muslim vote concentrations dispersed, political weight redistributed, the geography of representation redrawn.

Assam voted on 9 April. But the more durable question — for a man whose name was in the NRC, whose house a bulldozer flattened, who is treated daily as a suspect, and about whom the chief minister said, on the record, that his job is to make him suffer — is whether that man counted in this election, or had to prove his citizenship before he was allowed to vote at all.