A spectacle is playing out in Assam. Let’s call it Himanta Biswa Sarma vs the Constitution of India.

In the last seven days, the Assam chief minister has repeatedly – one should say brazenly – declared his hostility to a third of his state’s population.

“My job is to make the Miya people suffer,” he said on January 27.

The “Miya people” Sarma speaks of so contemptuously are the state’s Muslims of Bengali origin, many of whom arrived in Assam in the early 1900s and who are often vilified as “illegal immigrants” or Bangladeshis.

A few days later, Sarma urged the people of the state to do “whatever they can to trouble Miyas”, including paying them less for their honest labour.

This was in response to a question about allegations that workers of the Sarma’s Bharatiya Janata Party were actively trying to subvert the Election Commission’s special revision of Assam’s electoral rolls.

As Scroll reported, thousands of bulk applications were filed across Assam, seeking to strike voter names off the draft roll – largely Muslim voters who had just been confirmed by the Election Commission’s door-to-door verification. In many cases, the complaints were forged, signed by people who claimed to have no knowledge of them. BJP workers were named in several complaints filed by angry...

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