CM Sarma sounds alarm over surge in Facebook onslaught by fundamentalists

Staff Reporter

GUWAHATI: Over 5,000 Facebook (FB) accounts have been activated in Assam in the past month with a clandestine motive. The men handling all such Facebook accounts have a fundamentalist mindset ingrained in them.    

Disclosing this before the media today, Chief Minister Dr. Himanta Biswa Sarma said, “These accounts have been activated recently with a singular focus on Assam while showing no engagements on issues concerning the rest of India.”

The Chief Minister sounded an alarm over what he described as a coordinated surge of Islamic fundamentalist social media activity targeting the state in the run-up to the forthcoming Assembly election. “The presence of such elements in Assam ahead of the poll must be taken seriously. This is not just an electoral issue. It’s a national security concern,” he said.

The Chief Minister said that a forensic audit of 2092 of the over 5,000 Facebook accounts has been conducted and found that 700 of the accounts were traced to Bangladesh, 250 to Pakistan, and over 500 to the Middle East, besides some in Afghanistan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Australia, etc.

The Chief Minister said that the comments of such accounts mainly focus on the Assam Congress and one of its leaders. “I’ve a strong gut feeling that there’s a Guwahati-based WhatsApp group that communicates to all these Facebook accountholders who reside in different time zones of the globe to like or dislike Facebook posts. When we started scrutinising these Facebook accounts, they started making comments with addresses of IIT Guwahati and other Hindu names. However, further verifications have revealed such addresses and names as fake ones,” he said.

The Chief Minister said that a few people have taken shelter in the Kharghuli and the GS Road areas. “We’ve no idea if these people are associated with the Facebook accounts. However, they are under our radar. Even such elements have made inroads into some of the digital media in Assam,” he said.

The Chief Minister further said that the motive of this lot is not yet ascertained. He, however, said, “Such elements have been creating a narrative that Assam will either be independent or captured if one cuts the chicken neck. Such rhetoric smacks of an ‘unfinished agenda’ of certain foreign actors, who were out to engulf Assam, getting revived.”

The Chief Minister said that the men hiding behind these Facebook accounts that mainly propagate radical ideology belong to a single community.

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