"The Congress government, which passed the IMDT Act in 1983, has been accused of catering to mostly-Muslim Bangladeshi migrants in order to use them as a vote bank, and of allowing “demographic aggression” in Assam. The total lack of political will by the Congress-led government, as well as logistical obstacles to implementation will likely blunt any surge in deportations, but the repeal will nonetheless intensify communal politics in Assam and hurt the Congress party’s electoral prospects ahead of spring 2006 elections there… (U) A Congress Party government passed the IMDT Act in 1983 at the height of an anti-foreigner (read: Bangladeshi) uprising spearheaded by the All Assam Student's Union (AASU) in response to the growing number of Bangladeshi refugees in Assam. The new law supplanted the Foreigner's Act, which still governs the rest of the country, and was intended to assuage the anti-immigrant groups by setting up a judicial mechanism in the form of tribunals to determine the nationality of a suspect. In practice, it made deportations more difficult by moving the burden of proof of nationality from the suspect (as under the Foreigner's Act) to the accuser, i.e., in most cases, the government, but also private citizens and entities. The Congress government used the act to pay lip service to expulsions for electoral gain while allowing illegal immigration to continue unabated. (SBU) As a result, the IMDT Act became widely viewed by ethnic Assamese, their parties, and the national BJP party as a hurdle to identifying and deporting illegal Bangladeshi migrants in Assam. Largely-Hindu opposition parties such as the AGP and the BJP deemed the law "migrant friendly" and accused the Congress of shoring up its vote base by giving Muslim Bangladeshis the right to vote. As the AGP, All-Assam Students' Union (AASU) and BJP began to agitate against the ineffective and duplicitously-named law, Congress defended it on the ground that it helped prevent genuine citizens from being harassed. After former ASSU President and AGP MP Sarbananda Sonowal registered a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) against the bill in 2000 and the NDA government introduced a bill in Parliament to repeal the act in May 2003, the Supreme Court struck it down on July 12, 2005."