The Life and Death of Mukhtar Ansari

File photo of Mukhtar Ansari.

(Photo: PTI)

With his towering frame and a thick twirled-up moustache, Mukhtar Ansari stood apart from other legislators whenever he walked down the hallowed corridors of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly, the only place he could make full-fledged public appearances since being jailed in 2005. Two incidents — a riot and a murder — that took place that year continued to haunt his life and political career till his death under suspicious circumstances on 28 March 2024.

The Mukhtar story is indeed about the foul criminal-political nexus in East UP, where feudalism, caste loyalties, business interests and political ambition converged to form a lethal cocktail of bloodshed, retribution, and polarisation. But over the last seven years, since the Bharatiya Janata Party government came to power in the state, it metamorphosed into a tale of selective state vendetta and punishment of a powerful Muslim political family to appease the cynical pits of majoritarian sentiments.

In Purvanchal, where the lines between electoral politics, crime and the fight for domination, have long been blurred, a number of bahubali or musclemen politicians from different communities occupied the public imagination over the last three decades. Dhananjay Singh, Brijesh Singh, Hari Shankar Tiwari, Raghuraj Pratap Singh alias Raja Bhaiya, Brij Bhushan Singh Saran, Vijay Mishra, Atiq Ahmed and Mukhtar Ansari consistently featured in the notoriety list.

Some went through their share of ignominy while others were patronised by the ruling dispensation, probably due to their dominant caste identities. But it was Mukhtar, who faced the biggest brunt of the iron-fist policy launched against alleged criminals under the Yogi Adityanath regime; his political identity, for long pre-fixed with his criminal antecedents, was gradually stripped and replaced by the state-designated label of ‘mafia’.

The dubious circumstances surrounding his death in judicial custody and allegations of murder levelled by his family against the state government, raise serious questions about the conduct of the state amid a diminishing rule of law. On numerous instances, Mukhtar had alleged a threat to his life in jail.

Therefore, we cannot view his last days in isolation, even if the state narrative that he died of natural causes eventually prevails — they were tightly linked to his past, both personal and political.

65 FIRs in the Last Four Decades

In 2005, Mukhtar was accused of fanning communal riots in his constituency Mau, although he claimed he had merely ventured out atop a jeep to calm down the situation. Members of the Hindu Yuva Vahini, a right-wing outfit run by Yogi Adityanath, then a Member of Parliament from Gorakhpur and today Chief Minister, were also accused of the crime. The two leaders did not share an amicable relationship.

Mukhtar was arrested following the riots and while he was in jail, he and his brother Afzal Ansari, an MP today, were accused of orchestrating the sensational murder of BJP MLA Krishnanand Rai and six others. A Bhumihar who was endorsed by Brijesh Singh, a Thakur muscleman politician and Mukhtar’s adversary in the war of dominance in Purvanchal, Rai had ended Afzal’s undefeated streak in the MLA election in Mohammadabad seat in Ghazipur in 2002. Afzal had won the seat five times — four times as a Communist Party of India candidate.

In 2001, Brijesh Singh, who went on to become MLC and received political backing from the BJP, and his associate were accused of ambushing Mukhtar’s convoy in Usri Chatti. Mukhtar was injured but survived. Three of his associates were, however, killed.

Mukhtar died on 28 March before he could testify in the Usri Chatti case. His family have alleged that he was poisoned to death in Banda jail as part of a conspiracy to protect Brijesh Singh. Although the Krishnanand Rai murder continued to cast a long shadow over the politics of southern Purvanchal, and still does, in 2019 a special CBI court in Delhi acquitted Mukhtar, Afzal and five others in the case.

Mukhtar’s personality, Muslim identity, criminal antecedents and illustrious family background made him one of the most talked-about actors of the criminal-political nexus in the state. That perhaps explains the polarising nature of politics over his death. While government doctors said he died of a “heart attack,” his family have alleged he was murdered by spiking his food with ‘slow poison’. Opposition parties want his death to be probed. The BJP has accused them of politicising the death to appease Muslims.

The convicted former five-time MLA, the grandson of a former Congress president and army Brigadier, meant different things to different people. For his detractors, prime among them the BJP, he was a notorious Muslim ‘mafia’ gangster who allegedly enjoyed the patronage of other political parties for almost three decades and committed crimes from within the cells of the prison. At the time of his death, UP police said 65 FIRs had been registered against him in the last four decades. Many invoked murder charges and gang activity. Since September 2022, he was convicted in eight different cases, and even received a life sentence for the murder of Awadesh Rai, the brother of present Congress state president and ABVP-bred Bhumihar leader Ajay Rai, in 1991.

However, far from the studios of media debates and power galleries in Lucknow and Delhi, Mukhtar was viewed differently in the impoverished, feudal lands of Ghazipur, Mau and adjoining districts, where it was not extraordinary for politicians to have a criminal background or for criminals to enter electoral politics.

Mukhtar Ansari in Politics and Crime

He was immensely popular among the weavers of Varanasi and Mau, a small town identified by its small-scale textile units. He was born in Ghazipur, a district located on the eastern fringes of the state, known for its fertile Gangetic farms, villages that produce soldiers for the armed forces, a British-era Opium factory and the tomb of Lord Cornwallis..

Mukhtar’s supporters, who cut across caste and community, hailed him as a “messiah,” one who stood up against feudal forces and eased the grievances of the poor and backward communities. The tired description of “Robin Hood” was used lavishly to redeem him.

Despite media propaganda, Mukhtar and his family defied the binary of ‘Hindu-Muslim’ politics and barring the contentious allegations against him in the Mau riots, they were never accused of spreading communal vitriol.

In fact, many of Mukhtar’s associates, ‘shooters’ and ‘gang’ members, were dominant caste Hindus. Some of them even went on to achieve electoral success — one of them, Abhay Singh, an SP MLA, recently shifted his loyalty to the BJP.

Mukhtar’s family has had a striking electoral record. He himself never lost an Assembly election, despite contesting as an independent, and even came a close second against BJP stalwart Murli Manohar Joshi in the 2009 Lok Sabha election in BJP bastion Varanasi.

In 2014, he expressed his desire to take on Narendra Modi in Varanasi but eventually backed out to prevent a division of ‘secular’ votes and supported the Congress candidate Ajay Rai, whose brother he was accused of murdering. Incidentally, on March 31, Ajay Rai said he would not campaign for Mukhtar’s brother Afzal, the SP candidate in Ghazipur, even though the two parties are in an alliance for the 2024 election.

Afzal is a two-time MP and former five-time MLA, while the eldest Ansari brother Sibgatullah was elected MLA twice. In 2022, Mukhtar and Sibgatullah passed the political baton to their sons — Abbas and Suhaib, respectively — who were elected as MLAs. It is believed that Mukhtar feared the Adityanath government would thwart his candidature by convicting him.

Abbas, elected MLA from his father's constituency, May Sadar, was later jailed by the Adityanath government.

The non-BJP parties often relied on the support base of the Ansaris and feared their potential to disrupt electoral equations. Mayawati, Mulayam Singh and his son Akhilesh Yadav, all had trysts with the Ansaris, who have a background in Congress and Communist politics.

Before the 2017 UP election, Akhilesh Yadav overruled his uncle Shivpal Yadav’s decision to allow the Ansaris to merge with the SP, as he was worried about his ‘clean image’. Mayawati, who acknowledged their potential for garnering Muslim votes, was quick to welcome them into her fold. She even defended the criminal cases against them and pointed to the “goondas” in other parties. It was only after the 2017 defeat that Akhilesh Yadav, adopting a more pragmatic approach, realised that the Ansaris were more useful than a liability. Following Mukhtar’s death, Akhilesh, though bafflingly still hesitant to take his name in public for fear of annoying right-wing Hindus, raised serious questions of the Adityanath government.

The BJP's win drastically altered the situation for the Ansaris as the Adityanath government unleashed a wave of terror against Opposition politicians, especially those with tainted records.

Ansari and his wife were both designated as “gangsters.” He was dubbed the head of gang IS191 and dozens of criminal cases were lodged against him, his brother, sons and associates. The full might of the state was used to demolish and seize property and business establishments worth hundreds of crores belonging to the Ansari family, to cripple them financially.

People associated with Mukhtar were also shot dead — five till last count — in alleged encounters; till December 2023, 164 of his associates were slapped with the stringent Gangsters Act, six under the National Security Act and 67 under the Goonda Act, while more than 190 were arrested and 60 expelled from their districts.

The state action took on a more brutal shape after the Bikru incident in Kanpur and the killing of Brahmin history sheeter Vikas Dubey, in 2020, as the Adityanath government tried to downplay its political consequences by conveniently shifting attention to a Muslim politician lodged in jail.

The Sword Started Dangling Over His Head After Atiq Ahmed's Death

While Mukhtar’s death threatens to unravel the history of his political and personal rivalries with dominant caste politicians, it is also loaded with many unresolved questions that may never be answered due to the authoritarian nature of the state’s governance today. In December 2023, Mukhtar’s youngest son Umar approached the Supreme Court apprehending that the Adityanath government in collusion with his political rival Brijesh Singh was plotting to eliminate him in jail.

In his petition, Umar noted a worrying pattern: people close to Mukhtar and his co-accused in the murder of Krishnanand Rai were being killed or murdered one by one. One Firdaus was gunned down by the police in 2006; Mukhtar-aide Prem Prakash Singh, better known as Munna Bajrangi, was shot dead in Baghpat jail by another convict Sunil Rathi in 2018.

Bajrangi’s wife too had expressed fears that he would be killed by the state. Two years before that, Bajrangi’s brother-in-law and legal advisor was murdered in Lucknow and the fingers were pointed at the family of Krishnanand Rai. In 2020, another Mukhtar associate Rakesh Pandey alias Hanuman was shot dead by the state police in an alleged encounter when his car crashed into a tree early in the morning on a Sunday. His father had alleged the police kidnapped him from his residence and executed him. Last year, Sanjeev Maheshwari alias Jeeva, also associated with Mukhtar, was shot dead by an assailant while being produced in a court in Lucknow.

Mukhtar’s family believed that the sword started dangling over his head after former MP Atiq Ahmed and his brother were shot dead on live television last April by three young assailants even as armed policemen, often quick to fire in retaliation, stood as bystanders. The pattern of these deaths and their link may never be fully uncovered or established, nor would the allegations of state complicity reach a logical conclusion, in the absence of a strong Opposition or proactive judiciary.

Yet, they indicate a growing sense of state impunity and declining accountability from the public. Mukhtar’s life as well as his death — the true details of which are still unresolved — provided us with a picture of the murky, intertwined relationship between crime, politics and impunity, the reverberations of which may be felt in the upcoming election as well as in the times to come.

(Omar Rashid is an independent journalist who writes on politics and life in the Hindi hinterland. This is an opinion article and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)