BJP portrays Muslims as rats, mosquitoes, infiltrators, pigs to be eliminated through SIR
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The BJP’s social media handles, particularly in Delhi, have become abundant with Islamophobic content linked to the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR), where the exercise is projected as a weapon to eliminate Muslims who have been identified in the posts as infiltrators, rats and mosquitoes, and opposition leaders such as Rahul Gandhi and Mamata Banerjee were depicted as supporters of infiltrators.
As the Election Commission has yet to release the number of foreigners expunged from the electoral roll through the SIR in Bihar, and as an independent analysis by The Wire based on available reports indicates that these foreign nationals constituted merely 0.012% of the total, the BJP has nevertheless been targeting Muslims of the country altogether.
A series of posts in the form of memes, cartoons and even videos from the Delhi BJP’s social media have been portraying Muslims, whom they commonly identify through depictions of Rohingya and Bangladeshi figures in skull caps and burqas as infiltrators, thereby portraying Muslims in general in dehumanising ways, while simultaneously framing the SIR as a nationwide operation to weed out undocumented foreigners, The Wire reported.
The issue surged on 1 December when the party’s X handle released a graphic modelled on a movie poster that placed Rahul Gandhi, Arvind Kejriwal, Akhilesh Yadav and Mamata Banerjee in stylised Muslim attire, and the narrative suggested that political leaders criticising the SIR were aligned with so-called infiltrators, thereby equating Muslim identity with illegitimacy.
The party has long used the term “infiltrators” in reference to undocumented immigrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar, yet the rhetoric has often shifted during political campaigns to contexts that overlap with India’s Muslim population, and this pattern resurfaced as Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah foregrounded the SIR’s purported role in removing foreigners from voter lists in Bihar.
Independent analysis by The Wire suggested that the actual proportion of foreign nationals among Bihar’s voters during the SIR was negligible, and the Election Commission has not publicly released any consolidated data on removals.
Despite this, the Delhi BJP continued to push material that cast infiltrators as a menace and linked them implicitly to Muslims, and one video showed a woman explaining the SIR to her domestic worker, followed by a graphic that represented Modi sealing holes in a wall to block rats peering through imagery that reinforced the association between Muslims and infestation.
Additional posts included a Reel in which a harvester moved through a field, with pig-like creatures fleeing the machine as the audience was encouraged to perceive these animals as infiltrators, and another Reel featured Mamata Banerjee seated on a chair supported by legs labelled with terms associated with immigration, which were depicted as being severed by the SIR.
A further Reel showed a family dressed in Muslim attire fleeing their home as the SIR was invoked symbolically through the smoke of a mosquito coil, and the metaphor likened Muslims to mosquitoes, which reinforced a deeply offensive trope. The pattern continued in another video where a garage owner explained the SIR to a Muslim worker, asserting that infiltrators disguised as ordinary labourers were threatening livelihoods, thereby embedding the narrative of economic displacement into the broader Islamophobic campaign.
Other BJP units have shared similar content, and Assam minister Ashok Singal circulated a post alluding to the Bhagalpur riot massacre through imagery of cauliflower fields, which was widely interpreted as a symbolic reference to the mass burial of Muslim victims in 1989. The Assam BJP’s official account has also frequently pushed Islamophobic material, and the pattern highlights a broader trend across party social media ecosystems.