Hailakandi, March 29: Debonair yet amiable, Abdul Muhib Mazumdar, Congress candidate for the Hailakandi seat, is now frantically trying to present himself as the person who had drawn up the draft amendments to the Foreigners Act, 1946. The amendments are aimed at providing necessary safeguards to the Muslims in Assam who suffer from the fear of being stigmatised as migrant settlers from adjacent Bangladesh.

In his strategy to garner a majority of the Muslim votes (55 per cent of the total electorate of 1,24,652 voters spread over 149 polling stations in this remote constituency), Mazumdar is now beaming his campaign spotlight on the amendments to the new act.

The amendments will stipulate the setting up of tribunals where the alleged foreigners could move to buttress their claim of being Indian nationals.

This legal eagle, who held the posts of the advocate general of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh in the past, is also known as the architect of the controversial IM(DT) Act framed to safeguard the state?s Muslims from being hounded out as the foreigners. The act was scrapped in July by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional.

The latest amendments to the Foreigners Act are also caught in the eye of a storm with its opponents alleging that it was old wine in a new bottle.

Mazumdar?s home turf is Hailakandi, which is now slowly emerging from its cocoon of being a semi-town into a bustling urban centre. His father Abdul Matlib Mazumdar was a former Congress leader, who was elected twice to the Assam Assembly from this constituency and also became a minister. Following in his father?s footsteps, Mazumdar entered the political arena when he was young and consequently, got himself elected twice to the state Assembly andjoined the cabinet as a minister. He lost this seat in the 2001 elections when he, as a Samajwadi Party aspirant, was reduced to the ignominious fifth position bagging a paltry 3,773 votes.

Mazumdar has been pitted against 13 other candidates in this seat wherein each previous election, the trend was to pool votes on the basis of communal polarisation.

Though the town displays an impeccable mood of communal harmony at the best of times, it is only during election that identity politics based on communal considerations come to the fore.

Mazumdar is locked in a triangular contest with the AUDF candidate Haji Selim Uddin Barbhuyan and BJP nominee Mritunjoy Chakravarty, who lost the 2001 Assembly polls though he had bagged 26,775 votes against Sahabuddin Choudhury, an Independent. Mazumdar will, however, find it difficult to assuage the ruffled feelings of his voters who have been chagrined at his shifting of political allegiance at the drop of a hat. Starting with the Congress, he moved across the political spectrum to return to the Congress in 2004 after hobnobbing with the United People?s Party of Assam and the Samajwadi Party in the interregnum.