All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) chief Asaduddin Owaisi on Monday hit out at Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma over his “indigenous” remark on the migrant Muslim community, saying that it just a “naked show of bigotry and racism”.

“Bengali-speaking Muslims are already ‘indigenous’ to India. He is no one to demand constant proof of loyalty,” Owaisi wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Owaisi’s comments come a day after Sarma said that his government does not have a problem with anyone calling themselves indigenous “as long as they prohibit child marriage, do not engage in polygamy, encourage their children to pursue higher education, and other such parameters that are an intrinsic part of the larger Assamese society”. Sarma was responding to a question on a recent statement by the All India United Democratic Front’s (AIUDF) Nagaon Lok Sabha candidate Aminul Islam, that a large number of Bengali-speaking Muslims had settled in Assam before partition and should be considered indigenous to the state.

He also urged the Muslim community to follow the Assamese culture if they want to be treated as indigenous. “I have always said to the immigrant Muslim people that his government does not mind being indigenous but they should not get married twice or thrice. This is not the custom of the Assamese people…You should not allow girls aged 11-12 to get married. You should enrol your children to be a doctor or engineer, and not into a madrasa. To be indigenous, one has to accept the culture here,” the chief minister said.

Sarma went on to cite an example saying, “Hindus, Muslims, Assamese Hindus, Assamese Muslims- irrespective of whether they follow Sankaradeva or not, all of them respect him.”

The Assam government on Saturday stopped the selling of lands between two different communities for three months to avoid any possible “conflict on communal lines” ahead of the Lok Sabha elections. In a notification, the Revenue and Disaster Management Authority claimed that the intelligence agencies have informed the government of several cases of attempted transfer of land by fraudulent means in some places.

(With inputs from agencies)