New Delhi: The Delhi unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party intensified an online campaign around the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls using caricatures and dehumanising imagery to portray Muslims as infiltrators. The posts appeared across multiple social media platforms and featured Muslims depicted as animals or coded as foreign nationals.
The SIR is an Election Commission exercise to update voter lists. BJP leaders presented it as a nationwide crackdown on undocumented immigrants. The Election Commission has yet to release consolidated data on foreign nationals removed during the drive in Bihar. Independent analysis reported that foreign nationals made up only 0.012 percent of Bihar’s voter base. This figure raised questions about the scale and accuracy of the BJP’s narrative.
Despite the negligible proportion of foreign nationals, the Delhi BJP framed the SIR as a purge of infiltrators. Posts showed characters coded as Rohingya or Bangladeshi to represent Muslims. Other material equated Muslims with rats, pigs and mosquitoes. One video showed a Muslim family fleeing their home as a burning mosquito coil symbolised the SIR. Another reel depicted pig like creatures escaping a harvesting machine labelled as the SIR.
On December 1 the Delhi BJP account released a movie style graphic showing opposition leaders Rahul Gandhi, Arvind Kejriwal, Akhilesh Yadav and Mamata Banerjee in Muslim attire. The image suggested that any critique of the SIR was equivalent to supporting infiltrators.
Similar content appeared in Assam, where BJP leaders circulated posts that critics linked to past violence against Muslims. Analysts said the party’s repeated use of the word infiltrator tends to merge undocumented immigrants with Indian Muslim citizens during election periods. Human rights groups said the campaign risks fuelling hostility in a polarised environment.
