By Kunal Purohit
Mumbai: Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said on Thursday (March 12, 2026) that he wants to create “pressure” so that Bengali-speaking Muslims in the state “leave by themselves”, suggesting measures such as evictions, “depriving” them of government benefits and firing rubber bullets at Bangladeshi migrants.
Sarma, while speaking at the ‘Panchayat Assam’ event organised by Aaj Tak channel on March 12, said he wanted to create “pressure” so that the state’s Bengali-speaking Muslims “leave by themselves”. In January this year, Sarma had asked Assamese people to ‘trouble’ Bengali-speaking Muslims in the state by filing complaints against them.
Doubling down on it, Sarma said deporting what he described as millions of undocumented immigrants from Bangladesh would be difficult and that authorities instead needed to create conditions that would encourage them to depart voluntarily.
“I won’t be able to deport them in my lifetime. That’s why I keep pressuring them… so that they leave by themselves,” he said. “You have to create a mahaul like, we don’t want you (sic). I don’t like you. If you create an atmosphere at home that I am unwanted, then people often walk out,” he reasoned.
In his conversation, Sarma outlined his plans to “deprive” the state’s Bengali-speaking Muslims of their benefits, and take over the lands they occupied, as part of his plan to create such pressure.
“You have to deprive them from those advantages,” he said, referring to the government benefits the community gets. “Then, they have to be evicted from the lands they have occupied illegally,” he said, adding that the government had already evicted Muslim migrants from across 50,000 acres of land. “When this mahaul is created, they will leave on their own. Bangladesh is just a next door neighbour,” he said.
Sarma said Union home minister Amit Shah had told him to “evict” migrants in 24 hours. The Assam government has already deported tens of thousands of suspected foreigners to Bangladesh as a part of its controversial “pushback” policy, which has routinely seen armed police or paramilitary officials push people into Bangladesh, often at gunpoint. This has also led to many Indian Muslims being pushed into Bangladesh. Human Rights Watch has called these expulsions to be “unlawful and discriminatory”.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.