Mukhtar Ansari: How a person from a distinguished family became a crime lord

Mukhtar Ansari straddled the worlds of crime and politics in Uttar Pradesh. The gangster-politician was booked in 65 criminal cases ranging from murder to extortion and was elected an MLA five times on the tickets of different political parties.

Ansari, 61, died of cardiac arrest in a hospital in Banda on Thursday (March 28).

Distinguished lineage

He was born in 1963 into an influential family that was prominent in India’s struggle for independence. His paternal grandfather, Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari, was the president of the Indian National Congress in 1927 and later was the Chancellor of Jamia Millia Ismalia until he died in 1936.

His maternal grandfather was a senior decorated officer in the Indian Army, Brigadier Mohammad Usman. He was awarded the Maha Vir Chakra posthumously after he lost his life during a conflict with Pakistan in 1948 in Jammu and Kashmir. Hamid Ansari, India’s former Vice President, is Mukhtar’s cousin.

Tryst with crime began at the age of 17

Mukhtar Ansari's entry into the world of crime came when he was still in his late teens and aching to establish himself as a formidable contractor in Eastern UP, which was already notorious for the nexus between successive state governments and local crime lords or bahubalis in the award of government contracts for various projects.

His tryst with crime began as early as 1980, when Ansari, just 17 years of age, was booked for criminal intimidation at Saidpur Police Station of Ghazipur. By 1986, an FIR on the charge of murder was also filed against him at Ghazipur’s Muhammad Police Station.

Over the next decade, Ansari became a common face of crime with at least 14 more cases under serious charges lodged against him. As his reputation as a dreaded gangster rose across UP, in Ghazipur and neighbouring towns, Ansari, came to be known for his generosity. Tales of how no one in need of help ever returned empty-handed from Fatak – as Ansari’s residence in Ghazipur is popularly called because of its massive entry gate – have now become legend across the crime and poverty-infested badlands of Poorvanchal.

To the people of Ghazipur and its adjoining districts who benefited from his largesse, Ansari’s foray into the world of crime was “unavoidable” given his determination in cracking the government contract mafia that had existed in the 1980s. Nearly all local Bahubalis of Poorvanchal who, at the time, were prominent names in the government contract mafia were Thakurs and Bhumihars. Ansari was, arguably, the first Muslim who insisted on breaking that monopoly and his rivalries with the likes of Brijesh Singh and Awadhesh Rai, were a direct fallout of the ‘competition’ in bagging contracts.

With the narrative of Hindutva consuming the political rhetoric of UP in subsequent years, Ansari may have come to be known as a Muslim gangster, often bracketed with criminal-politicians like Atiq Ahmed who was killed while in police custody last April, but the fact is that a majority of his henchmen, including Munna Bajrangi who gunned down contractor-turned-BJP MLA Krishnanand Rai in 2005, were Hindus. Locals in Ghazipur also assert that Ansari, be it in his criminal activities or his alter ego of a benevolent benefactor of commoners, never differentiated between a Hindu and a Muslim.

Entry into politics

This seemingly hard-to-reconcile combination of a Bahubali Robin Hood is what propelled Ansari’s effortless transition into politics and, in subsequent years, strengthened his political influence beyond his family stronghold of Ghazipur.

Ansari was first elected to the UP Assembly in 1996 from Mau on a ticket from the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). He continued his successful run on the seat as an independent candidate in 2002 and 2007 Assembly elections.

In 2012, he launched Qaumi Ekta Dal (QED) and won from Mau again.

He won from Mau again in 2017. Interestingly, though Ansari had been lodged in different jails of UP and Punjab since 2005, he continued to contest and win elections up until 2017. In 2022, he vacated the seat for his son Abbas Ansari who won from the seat on the ticket of the OP Rajbhar-led Suheldev Bhartiya Samaj Party, which was at the time an ally of Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party (SP).

Ironically, in the wake of his death while many have raised suspicions over the possibility of Ansari being “neutralized” by UP’s BJP-led Yogi Adityanath government – an allegation that stems from a letter Ansari had written to the special MP/MLA court a week before his death alleging that he was being administered slow poison by prison authorities – his son, technically, is now an MLA of the BJP-led NDA combine. The SBSP, of which Ansari’s son Abbas is an MLA, had severed ties with the SP and joined the BJP’s NDA coalition last year.

Host of cases and convictions

Ansari had 28 criminal cases, including that of murder, and seven cases under the UP's Gangster Act registered against him since 2005. He had been convicted in eight criminal cases since September 2022 and was facing trial in 21 cases in different courts. The convictions against him, as is evident, only began after Adityanath entered his second term as UP chief minister.

Ansari was awarded a life term and a penalty of Rs 2.02 lakh by Varanasi MP/MLA court earlier this month in a case of fraudulently obtaining an arms licence around 37 years ago. This was the eighth case in which he was sentenced in the past 18 months by different courts of UP and the second in which he was awarded a life term.

On December 15, 2023, a Varanasi MP/MLA court sentenced Ansari to five years and six months for giving a death threat to Mahavir Prasad Rungta for turning hostile and not pursuing a case involving the kidnapping and murder of BJP leader and coal trader Nand Kishore Rungta on January 22, 1997.

On October 27, 2023, a Ghazipur MP/MLA court awarded him 10 years of rigorous imprisonment and a penalty of Rs 5 lakh in a Gangster Act case lodged against him in 2010. On June 5, 2023, a Varanasi MP/MLA awarded life imprisonment to Ansari in the case of murder of Awadesh Rai, the elder brother of former Congress MLA and present UP Congress president Ajay Rai.

Awadesh Rai was sprayed with bullets when he and his brother Ajay were standing outside their house in the Lahurabir locality of Varanasi on August 3, 1991.

On April 29, 2023, Ghazipur MP/MLA court sentenced Ansari to 10 years of imprisonment in a case of the murder of BJP MLA Krishnanand Rai.

The Lucknow Bench of Allahabad High Court on September 23, 2022, awarded Ansari five years of rigorous imprisonment in a Gangster Act case registered against him in 1999 at Hazratganj Police Station in Lucknow and imposed a fine of Rs 50,000 on him.

The Ghazipur MP/MLA court on December 15, 2022, awarded him 10 years of imprisonment and slapped a penalty of ₹5 lakh each in two separate cases of Gangster Act lodged against him in 1996 and 2007.

Ansari's first conviction in the last 13 months was awarded by the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad high court. He was awarded seven years of imprisonment on September 21, 2022, for threatening the jailor of the Lucknow district jail in 2003.

Brought to UP from Punjab jail

The Uttar Pradesh government had to approach the Supreme Court to bring Ansari back to the state from Ropar jail in Punjab. Ansari, then a BSP MLA, was lodged in the Ropar jail in January 2019 in connection with an extortion case and remained there for a period of more than two years.

In March 2021, while hearing a plea of the UP government, the SC had directed the Punjab government to hand over Ansari's custody to UP, saying it was being denied on trivial grounds under the guise of medical issues.

The court had also said that a convict or an under-trial prisoner who disobeys the law of the land cannot oppose his transfer from one prison to another and the courts are not to be helpless bystanders when the rule of law is being challenged with impunity.

Ansari gang under intense heat from police

Since 2020, the Ansari gang has been under intense heat from the police, which has either seized or demolished illegal property worth ₹608 crore belonging to the gang. Illegal business, contracts, or tenders worth over Rs 215 crore of the gang was also stopped by the police in this period.

2005 Mau riots

There is ample public record of how the riots that took place in October 2005 in the town of Mau, Mukhtar’s stronghold and constituency, were instigated by the rabid Hindutva outfit Hindu Yuva Vahini (HYV) which is affiliated with the present chief minister of UP, Yogi Adityanath. The blame for the riots, however, fell on Ansari and he, along with several of his supporters were booked in a litany of cases linked to the communal conflagration.

Local accounts and reports of various ‘ fact-finding’ teams that visited Mau in the immediate aftermath of the Mau riots, however, offer a different account of Ansari’s role. After the riots, several mainstream Hindi news channels had begun broadcasting a video that showed Ansari sitting atop an armoured vehicle and travelling through the localities of Mau. This video had no audio and the narrative that gained ground was that Ansari was roaming around Mau to instigate rioters. It was only days later that an unedited video, with the sound, came into the public domain and was also circulated by Ansari’s team.

The unedited video showed Ansari actually pleading with agitated mobs to return to their homes and of him assuring them of the return to normalcy. Embarrassed, the local administration later conceded that it had sought Ansari’s help in restoring peace to the riot-affected areas. None of this, of course, helped Ansari when the cases connected to the riots that were lodged against him proceeded in the courts as the Mau administration sunk into silence, refusing to explain how it had reached out to Ansari for his help in containing the riots.