Key Points
Lucknow: Mukhtar Ansari straddled the worlds of crime and politics in eastern UP for decades, a messiah to some and mafia don for others, but the downfall of his empire took less than a decade to be completed after he was included in the ranks of listed criminals the Yogi government resolved to bring to book...
Ansari traced his lineage to Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari - his paternal grandfather who was a freedom fighter and former president of the Indian National Congress and one of the founders of the Jamia Milia Islamia University, while his maternal grandfather was Brigadier Mohammad Usman, a Maha Vir Chakra recipient...
His stint in organised crime in Purvanchal had started much earlier and Ansari followed in the footsteps of earlier 'bahubalis' of Purvanchal like Harishankar Tiwari and Virendra Pratap Shahi, to use muscle power to profit from government contracts issued for the underdeveloped region...
Though he had remained in jail since 2005, it was with Yogi Adityanath taking over as CM in 2017, with a resolve to "clean up" the state, that Ansari was made one of about 78 listed criminals, joining the ranks of other hardened criminals like Ateeq Ahmed, Vijay Mishra, and Anil Dujana, among others...
Further, a concerted administrative effort started to get these listed criminals convicted by ensuring better protection of witnesses, and Ansari received his first-ever conviction in 2022..
