 "Mukhtar Ansari")
Three months after his legal representatives appealed to the Supreme Court (SC) regarding concerns over potential elimination while in custody, former legislator Mukhtar Ansari, who was incarcerated, died on Thursday, March 28, from a "cardiac arrest." He was urgently taken to a hospital from Banda jail in Uttar Pradesh prior to his demise.
Government doctors stated that Ansari had lost consciousness. However, two days before his death, his brother Afzal Ansari, who is a former Member of Parliament (MP) and a Samajwadi Party (SP) candidate for Ghazipur, made a public claim that Mukhtar was being poisoned in jail as part of a "conspiracy" to murder him.
In December 2023, Umar Ansari, Mukhtar's younger son, filed a petition with the apex court expressing fear that the state government intended to assassinate his father in Banda jail, where he was detained as both a convict and an accused in several criminal cases.
Ansari, who has been under scrutiny by the Yogi Adityanath-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government since it assumed power in the state in 2017, collapsed in his cell. He was transported to Rani Durgavati Medical College around 8:25 pm on Thursday, following an episode of vomiting and loss of consciousness, according to a medical bulletin from the hospital.
Upon arrival at the emergency ward, a team of nine doctors promptly attended to him. However, despite their best efforts, he succumbed to cardiac arrest, as noted in the bulletin.
Ansari was 63-years old. In response to his death, security measures have been intensified in several districts in eastern Uttar Pradesh.
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Earlier, on Tuesday, March 26, Ansari had been admitted to the hospital for several hours due to complaints of abdominal pain.
The Uttar Pradesh prison department reported that Ansari was urgently taken to a hospital on Tuesday following a sudden deterioration in his health, which resulted in him collapsing in the toilet. He was transferred to Banda Medical College in the middle of the night.
According to the hospital, he was admitted on March 26 at 3:55 am with complaints of abdominal pain and inability to pass stool and flatus for 4-5 days. The 8 am bulletin from Banda Medical College stated that the patient was admitted, and conservative treatment had commenced, with the patient currently stable.
Ansari was subsequently discharged from the hospital's ICU and returned to jail.
On the same day, Afzal Ansari claimed that his brother had been served food laced with a poisonous substance. "There is a conspiracy to murder him in jail," Afzal told reporters.
In an application submitted to the MP/MLA court in Barabanki on March 21, Ansari claimed that on March 19, he was given some poisonous substance with his food in jail, which caused him to feel uneasy and experience pain in his limbs. He alleged that around 40 days earlier, he had been given a "slow poison" with his meal.
The Samajwadi Party leader, who emerged victorious in the 2019 Lok Sabha election from Ghazipur, stated that his brother's health was rapidly deteriorating, and he had been unable to attend the virtual hearings in his case for the past few days.
Mukhtar's son, Umar Ansari, had filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court in December last year, requesting that his father be transferred to a jail outside Uttar Pradesh. On December 15, 2023, the Adityanath government assured the Supreme Court that "necessary augmentation of security as needed will be made" to ensure that no harm comes to Ansari while in custody.
In his petition, Umar Ansari had expressed concern for his father's well-being by highlighting the murder of former Lok Sabha MP and tainted politician Atiq Ahmad and his brother Ashraf Ahmad, who were killed in front of reporters while being escorted by a team of police officers for a routine medical check-up in Prayagraj on April 15, last year. The footage of the Ahmad brothers' murder was broadcast live on television.
On January 16, 2024, a division bench of Justices Hrishikesh Roy and Prashant Kumar Misra directed the Uttar Pradesh government to continue with all the security arrangements to ensure that Ansari "is fully protected from any security breach and consequences." During this hearing, KM Natraj, the additional solicitor general, referred to the "elaborate security arrangements" made for Ansari.
The court then scheduled the matter for the third week of July.
A five-time former Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) from Mau in eastern Uttar Pradesh, Mukhtar, had come under scrutiny by the Adityanath-led government. Since its ascension to power in 2017, the government initiated a concerted effort involving law enforcement and administrative bodies against Mukhtar, his relatives, and affiliates. The state authorities designated Mukhtar as a "gangster" and the leader of gang IS191, instigating a series of criminal charges against him, his family members—including his son and current MLA Abbas Ansari—his sibling and former Member of Parliament (MP) Afzal Ansari, and other associates. Properties belonging to the Ansari family, alleged to be under illegal possession and worth substantial amounts, were confiscated, demolished, or reclaimed by the government, as reported by the police.
Till December 2023, law enforcement actions had resulted in the shootings of five individuals connected to Ansari in what were described as encounters, alongside legal measures against 292 individuals associated with him. This included the filing of charges against 164 of his affiliates under the Gangsters Act, six under the National Security Act (NSA), another 67 under the Gangsters Act, the expulsion of 60 associates from their respective districts, the arrest of 186 individuals, and the annulment of 175 weapon licences.
In December 2023, Umar Ansari, Mukhtar's son, filed a writ petition under Article 32 of the Constitution, requesting the Supreme Court to provide his father with protection. This entailed a plea for Mukhtar's transfer from Banda jail to a facility outside the state, citing a pressing and serious risk to his safety and well-being in Uttar Pradesh, as articulated by Umar.
Representing Ansari, senior counsel Kapil Sibal argued that despite the Allahabad High Court's orders to ensure Ansari's safety, Sanjeev Maheshwari, also known as Jeeva and a co-accused in the 2005 murder of BJP MLA Krishnanand Rai, was shot inside a Lucknow courtroom on June 8, 2023, while being escorted from jail.
In response to a petition by Ansari's wife, the Allahabad High Court had directed the Director General of Police (DGP) in Uttar Pradesh in May 2023 to guarantee Ansari's security both inside and outside the prison. The court mandated that Ansari be provided with "full security" during transfers between jails and while being presented in court from jail. The HC had taken into consideration the murder of Atiq Ahmad and his brother while passing the directions, and said, "Media persons would not be permitted to interview him. He would be accompanied by police personnel during his ingress and egress from jail. This order is being passed seeing the recent episode which occurred in the State of Uttar Pradesh, wherein in the garb of media persons some criminals had killed two under trial prisoners, who were in the custody of the police personnel, whose matters are pending before the apex court."
In his petition, Mukhtar Ansari's son alleged that the Adityanath government harboured a hostile attitude towards the former MLA and was orchestrating a "larger conspiracy" to eliminate him while he was in jail. The threat perception was based on "reliable information" Mukhtar had received that his life was in grave danger and that there "is a conspiracy afoot involving several actors within the state establishment" to assassinate him in Banda jail.
Over the past year or so, Mukhtar Ansari has been convicted in more than seven separate cases. On December 15, a Varanasi court sentenced him to six years and five months in prison for a 1997 case involving charges of criminal intimidation. His other convictions include a life sentence handed down by a Varanasi court in June 2023 for the murder of Awadesh Rai, brother of Congress state president Ajay Rai, and a 10-year sentence for the kidnapping of a Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) leader in connection with Krishnanand Rai's murder in 2005.
In his petition, Umar Ansari noted that out of those accused of Rai's murder, four, including Jeeva, had already been killed. While Firdaus was shot dead by the Special Task Force (STF) in 2006, Prem Prakash Singh, also known as Munna Bajrangi, was murdered in Baghpat jail in 2018 by fellow convicted gangster Sunil Rathi. More than a week before his murder, Bajrangi's wife, Seema Singh, held a press conference in Lucknow on June 29, alleging that the Uttar Pradesh police, along with some political leaders and officials, were plotting to have her husband killed in a "fake encounter" outside the prison. Singh also claimed that there had been an attempt to poison her husband during his time in Jhansi jail.
In August 2020, Rakesh Pandey, an associate of Mukhtar, was shot dead by the police in an alleged "encounter" after the SUV he was allegedly travelling in with four others crashed into a tree in the early hours of a Sunday. Pandey's family has accused the police of picking him up from his home in Lucknow before killing him.
Mukhtar's eldest son, Abbas Ansari, an MLA, is also currently incarcerated.
