Shiladitya Dev, a former BJP MLA from Hojai in Assam, has for years positioned himself as one of the most vocal foot soldiers of Hindutva politics in the Northeast. He gained attention by repeatedly making divisive and hateful remarks, mainly against Bengali-speaking Muslims, especially those he calls “Miya Muslims” or “Bangladeshi Muslims.”

In April 2025, when AIUDF MLA Aminul Islam was arrested for remarks questioning the Pahalgam terror attack, it was Shiladitya Dev who took to the media to brand him a “jihadi,” claiming that he was “running jihad as a politician.” Dev used the moment to amplify the trope of the ‘radical Muslim leader’, framing Islam’s Madrasa background as evidence of extremist indoctrination.

On October 24, 2022, just a day after the inauguration of a small museum in Goalpara dedicated to the Miya Muslim community, Dev publicly called for it to be “set on fire and set ablaze.” In a hate-filled rant, he claimed Assam was already “filled with Miyas” and questioned the need for such a museum. He went further, alleging that Bengali-speaking Muslims were attempting to erase Assamese culture and replace it with what he called “Arabic culture.”

His targeting of the community was laced with conspiracy: that the 1936 “Grow More Food” project was a covert attempt to flood Assam with Muslim migrants to annex it to East Pakistan; that Muslims still kept Hindu plants like Tulsi in their homes as evidence of their ‘Hindu origins’; and that their identity symbolized by the “lungi and topi” was alien to Assam.

In one particularly offensive comment, Dev referred to Assamese writer Ismail Hussain Jr.’s visit to a Satra monastery as a desecration, saying, “If he wants to revert to the faith of his origin, let him do so completely.”

In August 2023, after a string of lynchings across Assam, Dev again appeared at the scene, not to console the victim’s family but to meet with the families of the accused. When 45-year-old Majibul Haque was lynched by a mob in Darrang district, Dev visited Bamungaon, where the suspects lived, offering tacit solidarity to those under arrest. 

In 2020, complaints were filed against him for his communal statements. In 2019, he shared a video depicting the rape of a drugged woman, falsely claiming it showed a Bangladeshi Muslim man assaulting an Indian Hindu woman. The post remained live on Facebook for over a year.