A sharp political charge landed from Shimla on Sunday, 1 November 2026, as BJP Lok Sabha MP Anurag Thakur accused Congress leader Rahul Gandhi of plotting a 'takhta-palat' — a coup — by allegedly enrolling Bangladeshi and Rohingya migrants as voters inside India.

Posting from Shimla, Thakur wrote in Hindi: 'Rahul Gandhi ke irade Bharat mein Bangladeshi aur Rohingyaon ka vote banwa kar takhta-palat ke hain' — ('Rahul Gandhi's intentions are to stage a coup by getting Bangladeshis and Rohingyas enrolled as voters in India'). He tagged Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, the BJP Himachal Pradesh unit, and senior state BJP leaders Jairam Thakur and Rajeev Bindal.

The immigration battleground BJP has long contested

The charge is not new in Indian politics — but it is pointed. BJP leaders have consistently framed Congress positions on migrants and refugees as electoral opportunism in border states such as Assam and West Bengal. The Assam Accord of 1985 committed successive governments to detecting and deporting illegal immigrants who crossed from Bangladesh after March 1971. The National Register of Citizens, published in 2019 after a years-long exercise in Assam, was specifically designed to separate citizens from undocumented migrants — and remains one of the most politically contested documents in modern Indian governance.

Himanta Biswa Sarma, whom Thakur tagged directly, has made illegal immigration a centrepiece of his tenure as Chief Minister of Assam, regularly announcing detection and deportation drives along the Indo-Bangladesh border. His inclusion here signals that Thakur is connecting the Himachal political moment to a Northeast-anchored national narrative.

Why Shimla, and why now

The 📍Shimla geo-tag anchors the statement in Himachal Pradesh, Thakur's home state. Statements of this register — immigration, national identity, electoral roll integrity — tend to surface around election cycles, when BJP's core voter-mobilisation arguments are most actively tested. The direct mention of Rohingya Muslims, a stateless community that fled Myanmar amid documented atrocities and has found pockets of settlement across several Indian cities, adds a second, internationally sensitive thread to the accusation.

It is important to note: the attributed political intentions in the post represent a partisan claim. No independent public record corroborates the specific allegation that Rahul Gandhi or the Congress party has sought to enrol undocumented migrants as voters.

Congress has not yet responded publicly to this specific charge. Whether the party fires back — and how Sarma's government in Assam amplifies or modulates the claim — will shape how far this particular salvo travels.