Posted by New Delhi: They have a long history of violence. The north Indian states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have been the playground of a number of gangsters-turned-politicians.
Mukthar Ansari, who died on March 28th, came to symbolise the Bahubali phenomenon in the Hindi heartland.
Power didn’t just flow from the barrel of the gun for them. The dons-turned-politicians made a seamless transition from bullets to the ballot.
Why do they continue to win the trust of voters despite being on the wrong side of the law?
News9 Plus decodes the phenomenon of Bahubalis of UP and Bihar.
Mukhtar Ansari
Mukhtar Ansari was an accused in 63 criminal cases including 14 of murder and was convicted and sentenced in eight of these.
One of the cases in which Ansari was convicted was in the 2005 murder of BJP MLA Krishnanand Rai.
He was also a five-time MLA from Mau in Uttar Pradesh.
Since 2005, till his death, Ansari had been lodged in different jails of Uttar Pradesh and Punjab.
Atiq Ahmed
Gunned down on his way to a court-mandated medical check-up in April 2023, Atiq Ahmed had more than 100 criminal cases including those of extortion, kidnapping and murder, lodged against him.
Fighting several elections from behind bars, Ahmed represented the Allahabad West assembly constituency for a record 5 consecutive terms.
Though the first case against Ahmed was lodged nearly 45 years ago, it was the Umesh Pal murder in February 2023 that prompted the UP administration to crack down on his network.
Mohd Shahabuddin
A dreaded don based in Bihar, Shahabuddin was convicted in several cases, including the attempted murder of then Superintendent of Police (Siwan), S.K. Singhal in 1996.
At the height of his notoriety, Mohd Shahabuddin ran a parallel administration. People came with their grievances to his personal court. He played judge in land disputes and even fixed doctors’ fees.
Beginning in the youth wing of the Janata Dal he flexed his criminal muscle to carve out a political career. Shahabuddin won the 1990 and 1995 Bihar Assembly elections on a Janata Dal ticket from Ziradei.
He was also the Siwan MP between 1996-2009.
Convicted for the abduction of a CPI(ML) worker, the court banned the don from contesting elections in 2009. Lodged in Siwan jail, he still called the shots. In the 2015 Assembly elections, he issued diktats on whom to vote for from inside the jail.
He was transferred to Bhagalpur jail after the murder of journalist Rajdeo Ranjan who exposed how ministers and MLAs of the Nitish Kumar government allegedly met him inside the jail.
On 1st May 2021, Shahabuddin died in Delhi’s Deen Dayal Upadhyay Hospital of Covid-19 complications.
Brijesh Singh
A one-time sharpshooter of Dawood Ibrahim, notorious don Brijesh Singh was one of most feared names in Uttar Pradesh. At one time, his operations in getting railway tenders and in liquor, coal and scrap businesses were spread across the country.
Wanted for more than 50 murders, including that of more than a dozen policemen, Singh was arrested in 2008 after a 22-year hunt.
In 2001, after a shootout with a rival gang in Uttar Pradesh, he was presumed dead. But he had actually sneaked out of the country to Nepal.
The Varanasi-Bhadohi-Chandauli MLC seat has been firmly occupied by Brijesh Singh and his family for the last 24 years. The gangster may have been in jail, but his family remains politically active.
Raja Bhaiya
Notorious as a Thakur ‘bahubali‘, Raghuraj Pratap Singh alias Raja Bhaiya has been elected as an MLA from the Kunda constituency or the seventh consecutive time since 1993 in 2022.
His grandfather Raj Bajrang Bahadur Singh was the lieutenant governor of Himachal Pradesh.
Once labelled as “Kunda ka goonda” by his detractors, Raja Bhaiya enjoyed the goodwill of both the SP and the BJP state governments.
He held ministerial positions under the governments of Kalyan Singh, RP Gupta, Rajnath Singh, Mulayam Singh and Akhilesh Yadav, despite only being an independent legislator in UP’s multi-party system.
On 3 March 2013, Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Zia Ul Haq was killed in Kunda, during clashes that followed the shooting of the village head.
The incident sent shockwaves across UP.
In September 2023, the Supreme Court directed the CBI to further investigate Raja Bhaiya’s alleged role in Haque’s murder.