Citizens for Justice and Peace
Shiladitya Dev
Shiladitya Dev, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader who was previously the Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) from the Hojai has been a serial hate offender and has been involved in making statements which are hate ridden and made with a motive to fuel the communal tensions between communities. His hate speech had led to an FIR at the Silchar police station in 2018 for allegedly making provocative statements to divide Assamese and Bengalis. A case also was filed in the same year in the court of chief judicial magistrate, Nagaon, against the BJP MLA for his frequent communal remarks on the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in the state. Dev had alleged that Hindu refugees were being shown as foreigners, while the names of Bangladeshi Muslims were published in the final NRC.
In Aug 2020, multiple FIRs had been filed against him by several groups and individuals for particularly inciteful speeches. At the time when he had been widely condemned by Assamese society he had dared dubbed Assamese litterateur who happened to be a Muslim, an “intellectual jihadi.” A month after this incident, his communally motivated posts on Facebook were taken down after an investigation was conducted by the TIME Magazine.
In June 2022, Shiladitya Dev was a participant in a news channel debate, happening on NKTV, an Assamese language news channel, where he made a series of anti-minority comments during one such live debate on its channel. During this debate, Dev spoke in Assamese about the alleged influx of Bangladeshis into Assam. The gist of his speech was, “80 lakh Bangladeshi origin Muslims have illegally entered India,” and that “During partition Muslims had created a separate country for themselves. They should be grateful they are being allowed to live in India.”
Once again, on October 24, 2022, Dev unleashed words that were inciteful, provoking the wider community in the name of ‘Miya Museum’, a day after the museum was inaugurated. He started his diatribe with, "Assam is filled with Miyas, so why there is need of Miya Museum, it should set on fire and set ablaze." This was a brazen incitement to targeted violence. Shiladitya Dev has been making open calls of violence against the Bengali Muslims and targeting their community.