New Delhi: Trouble continues to mount for mafia-turned-MLA Mukhtar Ansari, who was sentenced to life imprisonment Wednesday by a MP/MLA special court in a 1987 case lodged in his home district Ghazipur pertaining to a forged arms licence form. This was Ansari’s seventh conviction and second life imprisonment sentence in the last 18 months.
Interesting to note, though, is that in this case, it was the use of the term “allowed” instead of “sanctioned”, besides forged signatures of the government officials, that became the undoing of the five-time MLA once counted among the most dreaded mafias of Uttar Pradesh’s Purvanchal region.
Ansari had applied for a licence for a Double Barrel Breech Loading (DBBL) gun on 10 June, 1987.
According to the court order, a copy of which is with ThePrint, the licence forms submitted by Ansari had “allowed” written on them instead of “sanctioned” which should have been written by the competent authority — the District Magistrate.
Further, the court found that the signatures of both the DM and the Superintendent of Police on the arms licence forms were forged.
Timeline of case against Ansari: 1987 to 2024
The offence came to light when Jagan Mathews, who was DM Ghazipur from July 1988 to December 1989, received a written complaint from the Ghazipur SP about arms licences procured using forged signatures.
Mathews said in his statement — part of the judgment delivered Wednesday — that he ordered the Additional District Magistrate (ADM) to carry out a probe and found five to six individuals to be in possession of arms licences acquired illegally in collusion with collectorate staff.
Mathews’ predecessor Alok Ranjan, who was DM between 1985 and 1987, also wrote to him stating he had not ‘sanctioned’ the arms licences for Ansari and others. Stating that his signature on the forms dated 8 March, 1988, appeared to be forged, Ranjan also pointed out the use of the term “allowed” instead of “sanctioned” as is the practice.
The matter was referred to the Varanasi unit of the state’s Crime Branch-Crime Investigation Department (CB-CID) on 16 September, 1989.
A case was lodged against Ansari and others on 4 December, 1990, on a complaint by Additional Superintendent of Police (ASP) Ashfaq Ahmed who was then the chief of the Varanasi unit of the CB-CID.
Ansari and the others were booked under sections 467 (forgery), 468 (forgery for purpose of cheating), 420 (cheating), and 120B (criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).
“I was Ghazipur DM between 1985 and 1987, and had not sanctioned arms licences for Mukhtar Ansari, Rambahadur Singh, Abdul Wazid, Syed Mohammed Israel. I had not marked allowed on the licence forms of the licence holders, nor did I sign any such paper on 8 March, 1988. The word allowed and my signature was used fraudulently as part of a criminal conspiracy. Allowed does not mean approval. The word sanctioned is used for approval of an arms licence which was not done by me,” Ranjan told the CBI-CID in a written statement, which formed the basis of the judgment.
On delay on the part of the CB-CID in filing a case against Ansari and others, Uday Raj Shukla — district prosecution officer in the MP/MLA special court in Varanasi — told ThePrint the agency registers a case only once it finds merit in the allegations and is ordered to do so by the home department.
The CB-CID had filed a chargesheet in the case on 2 August, 2004, against Ansari and arms department clerk Gauri Shankar Lal, among others. However, the case was transferred to the MP/MLA special court in 2018 owing to Ansari’s status as an MLA from Mau at the time.
While Gauri Shankar Lal passed away during the process of trial, charges were eventually framed against Ansari under IPC sections 467, 468, 420, and 120B on 16 July, 2021.
‘Five-star’ treatment in Punjab jail
In March that year, the Supreme Court had directed the Punjab government to hand over Ansari to the Uttar Pradesh Police. Behind bars since 2005, Ansari was brought to Punjab in 2019 on a transit remand in connection with an extortion complaint from the CEO of a real estate firm.
Ansari was lodged at the Ropar jail for two years before the UP government moved the apex court seeking his custody in order to try him in “heinous cases of murder, extortion, cheating, fraud and Gangsters Act”.
Following fierce arguments by both sides, the Supreme Court handed Mukhtar Ansari over to UP Police saying that the transfer of custody was being denied on “trivial grounds in the guise of medical issues”.
However, the issue did not die down with the transfer. Harjot Singh Bains of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), who was earlier jail minister in the Bhagwant Mann administration, kicked up a storm in June 2022 when he accused the previous Congress government in the state of providing “VIP treatment” to Ansari during his stay at Rupar jail.
Bains had then alleged that Ansari was given “five-star facilities” and that his wife “stayed with him” during his time in Ropar jail.
While Ansari was in Punjab, another case was registered against him by the UP Police after he was seen being transported to a court in Mohali in an ambulance with a Barabanki, Uttar Pradesh, registration.
The allegation was that documents used for registration of the ambulance were fake and that the vehicle had been used to transport illegal firearms.
Ansari has been lodged in Banda jail since his return from Punjab in 2021. He has been convicted in seven of the total 65 cases he faces in the state.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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