On 16 September, the official X page of Bharatiya Janata Party’s Assam wing posted an AI-generated video depicting Muslim men and women going about their day at various locations in the state, including an amusement park, historical monument, and cricket stadium.
The obscene, communally-loaded video is accompanied by two captions that read “We can’t let this dream of Paaijaan to be true!!” and “Assam Without BJP”.
Here, ‘Paaijaan’ is a devious wordplay on ‘Bhaijaan,’ a term used by South Asian Muslims to fondly refer to their brothers or male friends. In this specific context, the BJP Assam page has been using ‘Paijaan’ as a portmanteau between ‘Bhaijaan’ and ‘Pakistan’ to refer to the Congress party’s Assam President, Gaurav Gogoi, and his alleged links to Pakistan through his British wife (the Assam government has even set up a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe these alleged links).
In fact, the latest video is just one in a series of several pieces of communally-charged and potentially slanderous visual content that the BJP Assam page has posted in recent weeks targeting Gogoi.
Multi-Media Racism
On 16 September, it posted a picture of Gogoi appearing sad following the defeat of Pakistan in the recent India-Pakistan Asia Cup cricket match in Dubai. Two days earlier, it had posted an AI-generated video of Gogoi talking to Pakistani army chief, Asif Munir, about a supposed mole in the Pakistani intelligence agency, ISI, who had leaked the Congress leader’s alleged cross-border links to the Assam government.
This story was originally published in thequint.com. Read the full story here.