Trigger Happy in a Digital Age: Was The AI Gun in Assam’s Hand Loaded by Himanta Biswa?

Imagine waking up, grabbing your phone, and seeing the leader of your state… loading a gun. Not at a shooting range, not for sport, but in a digitally constructed battlefield where the enemies look exactly like people you see at the market every day. It sounds insane, right? Like something out of a dark futuristic thriller? But that’s exactly what the BJP’s Assam timeline served up on February 7, 2026. They dropped a 17-second clip called ‘Point Blank Shot’ that was so blatant, it’s hard to believe it was real. They took actual footage of Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma and used AI to show him firing at men with beards and skull caps. The message was loud and clear. With flashing text screaming ‘No Mercy’ and ‘Foreigner Free Assam,’ this wasn’t political discourse anymore. It was a digital daydream of erasing an entire community.

The video, which amassed thousands of views before being scrubbed from the internet, sparked immediate and justifiable panic. Critics and human rights groups rightly labeled it a “call to genocide.” In a state with over 12 million Muslim residents—a third of the population—this wasn’t about catching undocumented migrants; it was about painting an entire community with a target on their backs.

But here comes the part that insults our intelligence even more than the video insulted our humanity. The inevitable cleanup operation has begun. The party has expelled its social media co-convenor, Ron Vikash Gaurav, throwing him under the bus as the rogue operator behind the post. Himanta Biswa Sarma himself stood before the press, claiming ignorance, acting as though this video magically materialized on his party’s official handle without his knowledge.

Let’s be real for a minute. Let’s talk about how power actually works in India today.

We are being asked to believe that a random IT cell worker or a social media manager has the autonomy to declare a digital war on a minority community using the official, verified handle of the ruling party in a sensitive border state. That is a lie. Anyone who understands the machinery of political IT cells knows that a post of this magnitude—slickly edited with AI, layered with specific political messaging—doesn’t just “happen.” These handles are guarded like fortresses. You don’t get to hit ‘send’ on something this volatile without the approval of a secretary, a media advisor, or a high-ranking party official. The approval chain for official government and party handles is rigid. The man they fired, Ron Vikash Gaurav, is simply the scapegoat for a mindset that comes from the very top. They are firing the finger that clicked the mouse, but they are protecting the brain that conceived the hate.

The hypocrisy is blinding. Fact-checkers have rightly pointed out that if a similar video had been posted by a student activist or a member of the minority community, they wouldn’t just be fired—they would be in jail under the draconian UAPA laws before the tweet even went viral. Yet, the Chief Minister Himanta Biswa—whose own image was the centerpiece of this virtual violence—pivots to filing defamation suits against the Congress party and boasting about infrastructure, refusing to even offer a simple apology for the terror his likeness unleashed.

The deletion of the video was likely less about remorse and more about optics, especially with Prime Minister Modi shaking hands in Muslim-majority Malaysia at the very same time. But deleting a file doesn’t delete the fear it planted. The Opposition, from the Trinamool Congress to the AIMIM, and leaders like Gaurav Gogoi and Pinarayi Vijayan, are correct in dragging this to the Supreme Court. This isn’t just “gutter politics”; it is the normalization of hate speech repackaged as “nationalist” content.

Assam has seen enough turbulence over the years. It doesn’t need AI-generated fires to burn down the fragile peace that remains. We must not be fooled by the firing of a low-level staffer. The video “Point Blank Shot” was a window into the soul of the current administration’s Hindutva agenda: one where “foreigners” and “Muslims” are deliberately conflated, and where the solution offered is not dialogue or law, but a digital bullet.

This wasn’t a glitch. It was a glimpse of the future they want.