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.