Himanta Biswa Sarma who was sworn-in as Assam's chief minister for the second consecutive term has been known to post about "push back" of alleged 'illegal Bangladeshis' on his social media. However, now even the Bangladesh government has become cognizant of his comments.Recently, Dhaka summoned the acting Indian High Commissioner to Bangladesh Pawan Badhe and protested against CM Sarma's remarks which could hurt Bilateral ties between the two countries.As per reports, Badhe was called to the foreign ministry, where Director General for South Asia Ishrat Jahan handed over a formal note of protest.This development came barely five days after CM Sarma's last post wherein he wrote, "Laato ke Bhoot baato se nahi maante. We continuously remind ourselves of this prophetic line when we expel infiltrators from Assam who don't leave themselves. For instance these 20 illegal Bangladeshis who were pushed back last night. Assam will fight, Pushbacks will continue."लातों के भूत बातों से नहीं मानते।We continuously remind ourselves of this prophetic line when we expel infiltrators from Assam who don't leave themselves.For instance these 20 illegal Bangladeshis who were PUSHED BACK last night.Assam will fight, Pushbacks WILL CONTINUE. pic.twitter.com/wLiIoR4TJc— Himanta Biswa Sarma (@himantabiswa) April 25, 2026Assam is Now the ‘Gujarat of the Northeast’: How BJP Cemented Its HoldA 'Ruthless' Push Back MissionThe most consequential of CM Sarma's anti-Muslim drives became publicly visible in mid-2025, when his government launched what it openly called a "pushback" policy of informal cross-border deportations. The first formal articulation of the policy came at a press conference in Guwahati in early June 2025. Sarma told reporters, "Push backs will continue and the process of identifying foreigners, which had been paused because of the NRC, will be sped up again. And this time, if someone is identified as a foreigner, we won't send them to a tribunal, we will just keep pushing them back. Preparations for this are going on." Another report also wrote about the same plan as a "large-scale push back" under the revived 1950 law. Last year in June, Sarma informed the Assam Legislative Assembly that more than 330 individuals had been expelled to Bangladesh under the Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act, 1950, a colonial-era statute under which a district commissioner can administratively order expulsion without going through a Foreigners Tribunal.In a post on X dated 31 December 2025, Sarma claimed credit for a "massive push back effort" in 2025, vowed to be "ruthless" through 2026, declared that "Assam is not your (Bengali speaking Muslims) breeding ground" and announced that 18 "unwanted guests" had been pushed back across the border the previous night.In 2025, we undertook a massive Push back effort to expel a huge number of illegal Bangladeshis back to their country.In 2026, we will be ruthless in this effort and PUSH BACK even more. Assam is not your breeding ground.18 unwanted guests pushed back last night.#AssamFirst pic.twitter.com/RYp99SGYvb— Himanta Biswa Sarma (@himantabiswa) December 31, 2025In an interview given to ABP News in April this year, Sarma described the push back policy in his own words. As fact-checked and reproduced by The Quint's WebQoof team, Sarma said, "Pushing back even one Bangladeshi is not an easy thing because there is Bangladesh police on the border also...They don't accept. There is no extradition treaty between India and Bangladesh. What we do is, we take the chance of darkness and push back in the areas where BDR is not present." However, WebQoof, found the claim about there being no extradition treaty to be false. India and Bangladesh signed an extradition treaty on 28 January 2013 and amended it in 2016 to "facilitate expeditious extradition of fugitive criminals between the two countries." Then Minister of State for External Affairs M.J. Akbar confirmed the amendment in a Rajya Sabha answer on 11 September 2016. Sarma's wider claims about the National Register of Citizens (NRC), that 1.7 million people had been declared illegal at a "preliminary stage," of whom 600,000 were Hindus eligible for citizenship and 1.1 million Muslims undocumented, were also incorrect.Bigger Victory Margins, Gains in New Seats: Did Delimitation Help NDA Win Assam?'Over 1,400 Deported Since 2021'Cumulatively, the push back tally has climbed sharply since the policy was publicly stated. CM Sarma's own count went from 330 expelled by 27 June 2025 to over 30,000 detected and more than 1,400 deported by March 2026, as per Assam's government's response. CJP documentation has flagged that the operation has caught Indian citizens, persons out on bail, and persons whose cases were still pending. Other media organisations such as Newsreel Asia have also written about Assam CM's statements, implications and how they overstep the judiciary.Notably, the push back policy bypasses the legal framework Indian law sets out for adjudicating citizenship. Under the Foreigners Act, 1946 and the Foreigners (Tribunals) Order, 1964, declarations of foreign nationality are reserved for quasi-judicial Foreigners Tribunals, designed to prevent arbitrary state action. CM Sarma's government invokes the Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act, 1950 to authorise district commissioner orders without tribunal hearings, replacing legal determination with administrative judgment. The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution, equality before law and the right to life, extend to non-citizens on Indian soil.On the international plane, the operation cuts against obligations India have accepted. The principle of non-refoulement, which prohibits returning any person to a place of persecution, torture or serious harm, is customary international law applicable regardless of treaty signature, a position consistently maintained by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which India is a signatory, guarantees in Article 13 that no person shall be arbitrarily expelled without an opportunity to present a case. The Convention Against Torture, signed by India, prohibits transferring any person to a country where they face risk of torture or cruel treatment. Pushbacks conducted at night, without hearings, legal representation or formal status determinations, contravene these obligations directly. Human Rights Watch's July 2025 finding that the deportations were "unlawful and discriminatory" sits within this frame.Sarma often frames the issue as a civilizational struggle to protect Hindus from demographic change. Assam's demographic record, however, is the product of centuries of trade, labour migration and colonial-era decisions, which the binary of insiders versus encroaching outsiders distorts. As this report argued, treating demographic change as identical to illegal immigration allows due-process protections to be set aside for a community deemed unwanted, weakening the same protections every person within Indian borders depends on, including citizens.BJP’s Hat-Trick in Assam: What Worked for Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma?From Propaganda-to-Policy PipelineThe push back operation is the social media performance layer of the propaganda-to-policy pipeline. It converts the CM's stated policy of forced displacement — documented in the verified statements record — into electoral achievement content, distributed across Facebook and X in a pattern that spans three years and accelerates sharply into the election period.Across the monitoring period, 68 push back posts were documented: 16 on X (all from @himantabiswa, January–April 2026), 7 on Facebook in 2024, 38 on Facebook in 2025, and 7 on Facebook in 2026, these statistics were reported by DAHRD (Diaspora in Action for Human Rights and Democracy).2025 X post — "In 2025, we undertook a massive push back effort to expel a huge number of illegal Bangladeshis back to their country. In 2026, we will be ruthless in this effort and PUSH BACK even more. Assam is not your breeding ground" — explicitly announces escalation as an electoral pledge.In 2025, we undertook a massive Push back effort to expel a huge number of illegal Bangladeshis back to their country.In 2026, we will be ruthless in this effort and PUSH BACK even more. Assam is not your breeding ground.18 unwanted guests pushed back last night.#AssamFirst pic.twitter.com/RYp99SGYvb— Himanta Biswa Sarma (@himantabiswa) December 31, 2025The Facebook component is substantial and predates the formal election campaign by over a year — this is not a campaign-period innovation. The practice of publicly celebrating forced relocations of Bengali-speaking Muslims as governance achievement, with gamified celebratory language, has been a consistent feature of the BJP. Assam social media strategy since at least 2024.The content pattern across all 68 posts shares identifiable features. Language is celebratory and gamified — eviction totals are announced as achievement scores, with framing like "Ye Dil Mange More" (27 March 2026, @himantabiswa: 1,926 likes) and "You are not ready for what's coming your way post May 4" (27 March 2026: 4,432 likes). Illegal Bangladeshis beware!You are not ready for what's coming your way post May 4.Assam will fight, Assam will prevail. pic.twitter.com/krr9ptdQfd— Himanta Biswa Sarma (@himantabiswa) March 27, 2026Individual Muslim names are published in some Facebook posts alongside announcements of their displacement — a practice that constitutes targeted public identification of private individuals based on religious and ethnic identity.Hindu festival calendars are used as framing devices for eviction announcements, linking the removal of Bengali-speaking Muslims to ritual celebration. The @himantabiswa X component alone generates 25,511 likes and 5,849 retweets across 16 posts. The term 'Bangladeshi' produces the highest average engagement in the dataset at 5,818 likes per post — 4.5 times the non-pushback average of 1,280 likes per tweet.'Push back' posts outperform all other content categories in audience engagement, confirming that this framing is not peripheral to the BJP Assam campaign — it is its highest-performing register.Of the 16 X pushback tweets, 15 fall within the MCC window (post-15 March 2026), confirming that forced displacement presented as governance achievement was a deliberate, active electoral campaign tool during the protected period.Little Pushback to Himanta's 'Push Back'There has been little meaningful institutional pushback to Sarma’s speeches so far.Courts have not taken any substantive action in hate speech cases against him. According to Live Law, On 26 February 2026, the Gauhati High Court issued a notice while hearing multiple public-interest petitions seeking action over his remarks targeting Muslims.Petitioners argued that his speeches were “inciting social and economic boycotts, propagating harmful stereotypes, and encouraging citizens to take law and order into their own hands.”Later, in April, the court asked CM Sarma to reply to the hate speech PIL. Earlier the same month, the Supreme Court of India declined to entertain three separate petitions raising similar concerns. Civil society pushback against these operations has been led most consistently by Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP).CJP detailed the case of Jaynab Bibi, a woman from Muamari village in Nagaon district who had been declared a foreigner by a Foreigners Tribunal under Section 2(a) of the Foreigners Act, 1946 in May 2017, with the declaration upheld by the Gauhati High Court on 17 February 2025.On 24 June 2025, a bench of Justices Ujjal Bhuyan and Vinod Chandran of the Supreme Court of India issued notice in her special leave petition, returnable on 25 August 2025 and directed that "petitioner shall not be deported and no coercive steps shall be taken against the petitioner."The same CJP article documented a series of related cases in which the organisation has provided legal aid before the Gauhati High Court.Sarma's hate speech has been documented as part of broader patterns that have been led by India Hate Lab. Its 2025 annual report, cited by CJP, recorded 1,318 documented hate speech events in India in 2025, an average of more than three a day, 98 of these events targeted Muslims, and 1,156 did so explicitly.Sarma figures prominently in the database. As The Wire reported, citing the lab's annual reports for 2024 and 2025, Sarma personally delivered 36 documented hate speeches in 2024 and a further 16 in 2025, targeting Muslims.Moreover, Newslaundry's report is also among the most direct journalistic challenges to the empirical foundations of Sarma's campaign. The report demonstrates that the NRC exercise excluded only 19 lakh people from a population of approximately 3.5 crore, of whom Sarma himself has admitted only seven lakhs were Muslims, while bulldozers in the same period had demolished an estimated 15,000 homes, mainly belonging to Bengali-speaking Muslims.Sreenivasan Jain met families like that of Abu Chufiyan in Goalpara, who had been rendered homeless despite holding documentary identity proof, standing amid the rubble, Chufiyan told Newslaundry, "It would be better if you kill us all."Sarma's communications strategy as Chief Minister is built around an unusually large social-media footprint among Indian state-government heads. His official, verified Facebook account (@himantabiswasarma) has approximately 4.9 million followers, his account on X (@himantabiswa) has 2.6 million and his Instagram account (@himantabiswasarma) has 2.7 million followers. To his followers he is known as "Mama", the Hindi and Assamese word for maternal uncle, a nickname documented in The Print's profile. The nickname is amplified by an ecosystem of unofficial fan pages, including pages that operate under appellations such as "SuperMama," that reproduce and circulate his speeches, AI-generated videos targeting Muslims, clips of Sarma mocking political rivals, eviction drive footage and a steady stream of anti-Muslim content, with some posts carrying explicit calls for violence and genocide.An analysis of Sharma's social media posts reveals that more than 16 X posts, and 17 Facebook posts were recorded before and during the 2026 Assam election cycle. The X posts are largely dedicated to his "pushback" operations, fear mongering of Muslim voting pattern, dehumanization of Muslims, and are written in a triumphalist, action-film register, "Mission 'Return Ticket' completed before sunrise," "Freedom at midnight? Quite literally," "HIT where it hurts the most, send them back to their host," "Borders secured, infiltrators REPELLED."One post list, alongside Bihu and Durga Puja, "Pushbacks" as one of the things "we celebrate in Assam". Across these posts, Sarma claimed personal credit for the cross-border return of more than 369 individuals named or numbered as "illegal Bangladeshi infiltrators," tagging the Assam Police and the Border Security Force. Several posts named individuals, including Md. Ramjan Ali, Noorjan Begum, Md. Iyat Ali and Md. Rakib Shaikh, by name and announced their cross-border expulsion as completed acts. Similarly, several of these posts ended in direct electoral solicitations to "secure your vote in BJP's favour."When considered colelctively, the pattern is that of a sitting Chief Minister who frames Muslims, particularly those of Bengali origin, as illegal and dispensable. One who openly calls for their harassment and violence, who presides over a state machinery that bulldozes their homes, undermines their fundamental rights, and pushes them across an international border, invokes legal authority the courts have not granted, and who, by his own public statements, makes clear that he intends to continue in the same manner even after securing re-election.(With inputs from DAHRD-Diaspora in Action for Human Rights and Democracy)Assam CM’s Claim About India & Bangladesh Having No Extradition Treaty Is False