So why did Himanta Sarma target the hardworking rickshaw-puller?

The normalisation of the exclusion of Muslims, referenced by the dissemination of AI-generated imagery depicting the “point- blank” shooting of Muslims, seems like a calculated invitation for organized violence.

By Naren Singh Rao

The contemporary political landscape of Assam, under the Chief Ministership of Himanta Biswa Sarma—a government which willfully mistakes power for destiny—squarely points to a deleterious rupture in the very fabric of Indian constitutionalism.

This represents a systematic and drastic erosion of the democratic ideals of secularism, equality and fraternity. We, the citizens, rapidly find ourselves in a political land where Muslims, as legitimate Indian citizens, and branded as the definitive ‘other’ in contemporary India, are being condemned within the country's political imagination. In this sense, to use a metaphor, we are witnessing a methodical murder of the sun!

Indeed, Sarma’s violent rhetoric goes beyond mere political or communal posturing. It constitutes a willful and abject breach of the Constitutional Oath—a form of concentrated political violence directed against the very idea of a shared sky. 

The fact remains that the holders of high public office are not ordinary speakers. When they speak, the State itself breathes.

When a sitting chief minister like Sarma urges citizens to "punish" Bengali-origin Muslims, whom he disparagingly refers to as “Miya,” it reflects the emergence of an “enemy within” as a justification.

In this searing light, we see the inconvenient truth: a downright perverse and obnoxious ideological prejudice is being effectively translated into State policy.

This is a particular kind of official malice that does not merely break the law but seeks to humiliate the very idea of it. When a leader like Sarma turns the gears of governance into a guillotine for social and economic boycott, he is effectively laying siege to the people of his own state.  Like the Nazis did with the Jews much before the Holocaust began.

Against the Constitution

Needless to say, this is nothing short of a war against the very idea of the sunlight of common humanity, and it flies directly in the face of several cardinal principles of the Indian Constitution: the Rule of Law and Equality before Law (Article 14), the Prohibition of Discrimination (Article 15), and the Right to Life (Article 21), among others.

The normalisation of the exclusion of Muslims, referenced by the widespread dissemination of AI-generated imagery depicting the “point- blank” shooting of Muslims, seems as a calculated invitation for organised violence.

Indeed, when an executive government, which is constitutionally duty-bound to protect every soul of the country, chooses instead to hunt a man for the God she/he names, it commits a crime against humanity.

Pursuant to judicial pronouncements such as Tehseen S. Poonawalla Versus Union of India (2016) and Shaheen Abdulla Versus Union of India (2022), the State’s failure to register an FIR against its own executive head reveals a collapse of the Rule of Law. The fact remains that the police, who are bound to perform this function, work directly

under the control of political masters such as Sarma. Ghalib’s stanza stands out as ever presciently truthful:

मेरा क़ातिल ही मेरा मुंसिफ़ है

क्या मिरे हक़ में फ़ैसला देगा

(My executioner is my judge;

What hope for a verdict in my favour?)

Sociologically speaking, the manufactured political narrative of ‘anti- Miya’ is essentially a designed instrument of the hegemony and hate politics of the polarizing ruling class which primarily functions as a phantom summoned to manipulate, injure and haunt the consciousness of the minorities.

By labelling a sizable section of the labouring class as “outsiders,” “infiltrators,” or the “other,” (in Assam, it is the hard-working and poor rickshaw-walla) the ruling executive government successfully fractures the secular collective of the working classes. In this context, it is worth noting that Sarma’s communal politics conveniently suppresses the National Register of Citizens (NRC) data—which, in no uncertain terms, demonstrated that migration is a religion-neutral phenomenon.

The appeal to economically attack a Muslim rickshaw-puller is, in essence, advocacy for a dehumanised level of class exploitation of the most marginalised and vulnerable labouring people. Indeed, this fragmentation is a strategy to prevent the formation of a collective class consciousness among the Assamese poor.

In turn, the common Assamese worker may begin to find the source of their misery not in the ugly nexus of the ruling business and political elites, but in the calloused hands of the fellow commoner’s back-breaking labour in breaking stones or pulling a cart.

Further, this political rhetoric serves as an ideological mask for neoliberal failures. The past lucidly tells us that such political communication tactics are deployed to obfuscate the State’s abject failure to address the hard questions of the material crises of the economy, livelihood, shelter and the environment.

By vilifying and scapegoating the Indian-Muslim community for the State’s systemic failures of development, the contemporary Indian state essentially preserves the greed of capital, business, and political elite. This, in turn, facilitates state-sanctioned lumpenisation of the working classes, wherein the commoners are tasked to act as a militia while enforcing the political elite’s diabolical ideology through the very violence that will eventually consume them.

The judicial response to these developments has remained—perhaps predictably—lukewarm. By framing this profound, urgent humanitarian crisis as a mere political rivalry, the courts risk stripping the tragedy of its moral weight. 

The petitions filed by the likes of Prof. Hiren Gohain and organisations like the CPI(M) are the voices of the collective that represent more than mere legal cases. They are, essentially, an act of solidarity and protest.

In the face of a rising tide of institutionalised hatred, to insist on a Secular Republic is to insist that human solidarity still has a place in a state without empathy or sensitivity —one where state-sanctioned hate politics is rapidly becoming the order of the day.

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Naren Singh Rao is an academic and lawyer based in Delhi, with specializing criminal and human rights law. Academically trained across several disciplines—including law, sociology, English literature and cultural studies—he is a commentator on the intersections of law, society, politics and culture.

Photos courtesy Maktoob Media/Instagram