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Muslims comprise 30.9 per cent of Assam's 26.6 million people. Six of the State's 27 districts have a Muslim majority population and the community is believed to control the electoral verdict in 60 of Assam's 126 Assembly constituencies. Considered against this backdrop, when an all-India Muslim party like the Jamiat Ulema-E-Hind organizes a huge public rally in capital Guwahati, attended by the Chief Minister, a top Opposition leader, and even the State Governor, people, including political observers and analysts, are bound to take the show seriously. Furthermore, when Jamiat President, Maulana Asad Madani, threatened to pull down the Congress Government headed by Tarun Gogoi during the rally on 3 April 2005, if it failed to fulfill its 18-point charter of demands within six months, the media played up the story.

Muslims might well be the deciding factor in the elections in nearly half the State's Assembly constituencies, but organizations like the Jamiat, or for that matter any other Muslim group, do not have a mass base in Assam, nor do they exercise much influence on the community, particularly the indigenous Assamese-speaking Muslims. But, in an election year, neither the ruling Congress, nor the Opposition Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) want to antagonize the Jamiat, which explains the decision of Chief Minister Gogoi and veteran AGP leader and former Chief Minister Prafulla Kumar Mahanta to attend the rally. Governor Lt Gen (retd) Ajai Singh's presence, however, surprised many.

The Jamiat's key demands include granting of land deeds or 'pattas' to Muslim settlers in the 'char' or riverine areas in Assam and citizenship certificates to the minorities for 'social security' . It is not the Jamiat's influence among Muslims in Assam, but the demands made at this crucial pre-poll juncture that will charge the political atmosphere in the State.

The Congress has always been the sufferer in the murky politics of citizenship in Assam with groups like the All Assam Students' Union (AASU) and opposition parties like the AGP and the BJP accusing it of nurturing the illegal Bangladeshi migrants as a vote bank. The decision of the Congress to press for retention of the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act, 1983, is projected by these bodies as indicating the ruling party's 'appeasement policy' towards the Muslim settlers.

The AASU, AGP and the BJP want the IMDT Act to be replaced by the Foreigners Act, 1946, that governs matters relating to foreigners and immigration elsewhere in the country. These groups argue that the IMDT Act provides enough loopholes to make detection and expulsion of illegal Bangladeshi migrants difficult.

The BJP has warned  the Congress Government in Assam that if it were to concede to the Jamiat's demands, "there will be a mini Bangladesh in every district in the State." However, the Congress has got back at Madani and the Jamiat, by describing the organization as a "blackmailer"; hence, it is unlikely that the Gogoi Government would be unduly worried over their threat.

Jamiat or no Jamiat, the fact remains that Muslims are a key factor in Assam's electoral politics. Therefore, even the AGP, which had earlier collaborated with the BJP in the State elections, held a 'religious minority convention' in Guwahati in March 2005. The conclave had decided to form a 'religious minority cell' to work for the socio-economic upliftment of the "comparatively backward religious minorities" in the State.

The Jamiat's move to come to the aid of Muslim settlers in riverine areas has once again brought to the fore the issue of Muslim population growth in Assam and infiltration from Bangladesh. In 1971, Muslims, for instance, comprised 64.46 per cent of the population in Dhubri district. This rose to 70.45 per cent in 1991 providing a total growth of 77.42 per cent between 1971 and 1991. By 2001 the proportion of Muslims had risen further to 74.29 per cent of the population in Dhubri. By 2001, the Muslim population in Barpeta rose from 56.07 per cent in 1991 to 59.3 per cent.

There is need, however, to make a clear distinction between the indigenous Assamese-speaking Muslims and Bangladeshi migrants before analyzing the demographic, security or political implications of such population growth. The growth rate of Muslims in districts far from the Bangladesh border varied between 30 and 50 per cent (1971-1991) while it was more than 60 per cent during the same period in areas bordering Bangladesh. Therefore, when one talks of Muslim vote bank and so on in Assam, one is actually talking about the role of the settlers and not necessarily that of the indigenous Assamese-speaking Muslims. This point is often missed.