Who is Mukhtar Ansari, the dreaded gangster-turned-politician?

Mukhtar Ansari – the man at the centre of an extra-cautious operation, and currently on his way from Punjab to Uttar Pradesh – is as criminals go, a man with many stories.

Ansari, a gangster-turned-politician, is facing 52 cases in the state and elsewhere, and 15 of them are in the trial stage. He has been in Punjab's Rupnagar jail since January 2019 in connection with an extortion case, and his custody now has been handed over to the UP Police. Ansari is being brought to Banda district jail.

On his official profile page of the UP Legislative Assembly, he lists his interests as ‘Protecting Dalits..Poor..Weaker People..Quami unity maintaining brotherhood..’. It is this list which casts a ‘Robin Hood’ sort of shadow on the dreaded Ansari.

Born in 1963 in Yusufpur town of Ghazipur district, Ansari was first elected to the state’s legislative assembly in 1996. Interest in politics was inherited from his family. His father Haji Subhanullah Ansari was a Communist leader while his paternal grandfather Mukhtar Ansari was a Congressman. Ansari himself dabbled in student politics in the PG College in Ghazipur from where he graduated in Arts.

From 2007 to 2017, a period in which Ansari contested elections as an independent, under the banner of his own outfit Qaumi Ekta Dal (QED) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), the number of criminal cases he declared in his nomination papers grew from 13 to 16. These included seven charges of criminal intimidation and five each of murder and attempt to murder.

The first murder attributed to Ansari happened two years before he entered politics. In east UP, where land deals and railway tenders have long birthed gangs and gang wars, Ansari was a name that evoked fear in Ghazipur, Mau and Varanasi.

Ansari’s most daring crime took place in 2005. In broad daylight, hundreds of bullets from AK-47s were pumped into BJP MLA Krishnanand Rai and six associates. Three years earlier, Rai had defeated Ansari’s brother Afzal in the Vidhan Sabha elections, and the murder was seen as payback for it. And though, in 2019, Ansari and the other main accused were acquitted by a CBI court, Rai’s widow Alka, now a BJP MLA, wrote to Priyanka Gandhi as late as March this year expressing threat to her and her family’s life from Ansari.

The occasion was the visit of Punjab’s minister of jails Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa to UP. Ansari had been jailed in the Congress-ruled state in a case of extortion since January 2019.

Alka Rai’s letter had said that the Punjab government had made Ansari a ‘state guest’ and that the minister was visiting the state with Ansari to permit ‘secret travels’.

Ansari is one of the many testaments to the unholy collusion between politics and criminals.

He joined the BSP in 2007, and two years later, was fielded as the party’s candidate from Varanasi. He lost the election to BJP’s Murli Manohar Joshi. In 2010, he was expelled from the party as his name cropped up in yet another murder case. Yet, when he and one of his brothers Sibtullah won the subsequent Vidhan Sabha elections under the QED banner, the BSP had no qualms in merging the smaller political outfit with it.

In 2004, the state’s ruling Samajwadi Party (SP) forced the resignation of a cop who had recovered a light machine gun from Ansari’s premises. The cop had subsequently recommended the slapping of POTA against Ansari - a suggestion unlikely to be taken by a party whose then president Mulayam Singh Yadav has addressed Ansari as ‘mananiya’ (respected). It was the Yadav patriarch’s support to Ansari which was one of the prominent causes of the rift with his son Akhilesh.

In 2018, the murder of Munna Bajrangi - Ansari’s sharp-shooter - was a turning point in the criminal-politician’s life. Bajrangi, also a politician who had fought and won the 1996 election on an SP ticket, was shot dead in Baghpat jail where he was lodged for Rai’s murder.

Upon learning of the murder, Ansari is believed to not have left his cell for some days. He had, perhaps, a clear inkling of what lay in store for him under the then newly formed BJP government headed by Yogi Adityanath.

The long journey of Ansari from Punjab to UP, under heavy protection and surveillance of the phones of police personnel accompanying him is the latest chapter in his gory saga. In a state where the vehicles of criminals have turned turtle in the past (remember the fate of Vikas Dubey who was being ferried from MP to UP), this is probably Ansari’s most dreaded journey.