Lucknow: In the winter of January 1999, when the police in Uttar Pradesh’s Bhadohi were bragging about having eliminated a “most wanted” criminal — along with three others — in an encounter, the ‘dead man’ came alive and surrendered before a local Jaunpur court.
That man was Dhananjay Singh, against whom as many as 46 cases have been lodged between 1991 and 2023, across Delhi, Jaunpur and Lucknow for murder, attempt to murder, extortion, causing hurt, rioting, criminal intimidation, etc. Singh has been acquitted in 21 of these cases while a final report — precursor to a closure report — was filed by the police in one of them, according to UP police records in possession with ThePrint.
Three other cases lodged against him under the gangster act in 2002-2003 were withdrawn by the Mayawati government, the records show.
From an “impatient” entrant of student politics to one of the dreaded criminals of UP and finally a white-collar politician — Singh’s journey is a perfect plot for a Bollywood thriller.
He has been an MLA (2002 to 2009), a former BSP MP (2009 to 2014) and is currently in the Janata Dal (United).
But just when he was preparing the ground to enter Parliament once again after fighting the upcoming Lok Sabha polls from Jaunpur, a judgment by an MP/MLA court in the city dashed all his hopes.
Singh, 48, was last week sentenced to seven years imprisonment in a 2020 abduction and extortion case after being convicted for abducting, abusing and threatening Namami Gange project manager Abhinav Singhal.
According to BJP insiders, the judgment, which came three days after Singh had declared on social media that he would fight the Lok Sabha polls from Jaunpur constituency, has come as a jolt for the JD(U) leader whose political career may well be over now.
“He (Singh) had been preparing to fight the polls for the past few months. He was in touch with both the BJP and SP. However, ever since the BJP declared Kripashankar Singh as its candidate from Jaunpur, Singh was taken aback that the JD(U) had been denied the seat in coalition (National Democratic Alliance),” an aide of Singh told ThePrint on condition of anonymity.
“Singh had been lobbying for a ticket from the SP too but with his conviction, he won’t be able to fight the elections this time as the sentence can be suspended only if the high court or Supreme Court do so. He doesn’t have that much time,” the aide added.
Speaking from inside the police van before he was taken inside Jaunpur jail Wednesday, Singh termed the court order as “a conspiracy hatched to stop him from fighting elections”.
Dhananjay Singh’s lawyers have filed an appeal in the Allahabad High Court challenging the order of the local Jaunpur court and demanding that the same be quashed. He has also sought bail till the time the court decides his petition.
Speculation is, however, rife that while he himself is in jail, he may field his wife, Shrikala Reddy, the sitting Jaunpur district panchayat chairperson, from the seat and that may end up taking away some votes from BJP’s Kripashankar Singh, a Rajput like Dhananjay.
Reddy on 6 March appealed to her husband’s supporters to exercise restraint and stated that he “needed their sympathy”, after Singh’s supporters were heard raising slogans against Union home minister and BJP leader Amit Shah while the criminal-turned-politician was being taken away following the court sentence.
Speaking to ThePrint, a Shrikala aide said that Singh will decide about her candidacy for the Lok Sabha polls.
Jaunpur has a sizeable population of upper caste voters along with Yadavs and Muslims, and in the last Lok Sabha election, it was among the seats where the SP-BSP alliance had defeated the ruling BJP. The constituency has sent several Rajput candidates to Parliament.
The seat has maximum Dalit voters at about 20 percent, followed by Yadavs at 17 percent, Brahmins at 14 percent, Muslims at 11 percent and Kshatriyas at 11 percent, according to local SP leaders.
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From student politics to ‘most wanted’
Kolkata-born Dhananjay Singh’s family shifted to Jaunpur sometime after his birth in 1975.
Singh’s tryst with crime began while he was in school, when the first case was lodged against him for breach of peace, mischief causing damage, and criminal intimidation, according to police records.
According to media reports, his name came to the fore in an attempt to murder case in 1992, and he appeared for three of his board exams while in police custody. He was then studying in Jaunpur’s Tilak Dhari Singh Inter College.
Suvrat Tripathi, who retired as DG from the UP police and is now an advocate in the Supreme Court, told ThePrint that Singh was a small-time criminal in the early 1990s who gradually became “most wanted” and subsequently joined politics.
UP CPI(M) leader Phool Chand Yadav — whose nephew Om Prakash Yadav was killed in Bhadohi Police’s 1998 encounter and passed off as Singh — told ThePrint that Singh was a dabangg (strongman) entrant in student politics who was booked for several petty offences during his student life in Jaunpur, such as physical assault and extortion, before his rise as a muscleman.
Singh’s hunger for limelight and fame was unleashed when he reached the University of Lucknow, where he befriended student leaders like Dayashankar Singh and emerging gangsters like Abhay Singh who would extend support to those fighting the student union polls.
Singh became one of the active students who led agitations against the Mandal Commission (for the socially and educationally backward classes) in his university days.
“The period from the 1990s till 2006 was the most turbulent period for student politics. A lot of criminal elements from east UP would come to Lucknow University during student union elections. Voting percentage used to be very low as a large number of students, especially girls, would keep away from elections, which would be captured by gangsters. Elements like Abhay Singh and Dhananjay Singh would need a place to lodge their supporters, and hostels came handy. Several hostels, like Golden Jubilee, were captured while the police remained silent spectators,” recounts J.V. Vaishampayan, former professor at University of Lucknow and former vice-chancellor of Kanpur University.
While Singh stated to the Election Commission that he had completed graduation from University of Lucknow in 1995, his name had surfaced in the sensational case of the killing of an assistant warden of Lucknow’s iconic La Martiniere College on 7 March, 1997, which shook the state.
The murder took place when UP was under president’s rule but two weeks after the crime, BSP chief Mayawati returned to power in the state.
Police officers who served in Lucknow during these troubled times (1990s) say that like several emerging gangsters at that time, Singh was involved in blackmailing officials for getting government contracts for laying of telephone cable lines, railway contracts for scrap, contracts pertaining to the Nagar Nigam and tenders of the Zila Panchayat.
“Dhananjay was friends with Abhay Singh but later fell out with him over tenders for government contracts. They were involved in blackmailing for getting government contracts for laying of telephone cable lines, contracts pertaining to Nagar Nigam and tenders of Zila Panchayat work,” Rajesh Pandey, a founding member of UP’s Special Task Force, said.
Singh was arrested in December 2011 in connection with a double murder case of a contractor and a tea stall owner who were killed due to a rivalry over PWD contracts in Kerakat area of Jaunpur in April 2010 according to the police. The arrest of the then BSP MP had come in the backdrop of Singh falling out with the BSP leadership. That case is still pending in court.
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‘Nobody would dare to testify against him’
Abhay Singh, now an SP MLA, has admitted in several interviews that he fell out with Dhananjay Singh after the murder of Ayodhya contractor Santosh Singh in 1998.
Speaking to ThePrint, Abhay Singh alleged that Dhananjay Singh and Guddu Muslim, an aide of the notorious Atiq Ahmed, had plotted Santosh’s murder.
“They called him for a meeting in 1998 and poisoned him. A case was lodged in Hussainganj police station of Lucknow in connection with the murder, and Dhananjay Singh became one of the accused. However, he got bail and got acquitted in the case due to lack of evidence. Nobody dared to testify against him,” said Abhay Singh.
He further alleged that Dhananjay Singh was behind the murder of the La Martiniere College warden but his involvement could not be proved due to lack of evidence.
While he was accused in several cases, the first concrete action against Dhananjay came only in the aftermath of the July 1997 daylight murder of Public Works Department assistant engineer Gopal Sharan Srivastava, when the Mayawati government came under pressure to act.
Srivastava was associated with then chief minister Mayawati’s dream project, Dr Ambedkar Memorial Park.
Accused in the case, Singh was on the run and declared an absconder by the UP Police. A reward of Rs 50,000 was declared on his head — a sum that was then reserved only for the most hardened criminals.
In 2000, Singh was charged with murdering Dr Bachi Lal Rawat, the then Director General (family welfare) of UP. Lal was out for a morning walk when he was shot dead at point blank range.
After being on the run for a long time in the aftermath of the PWD engineer murder case, Singh surrendered before a Jaunpur court in January 1999 in another case while the Bhadohi cops were battling allegations of killing three youngsters who had no links with him.
According to Singh’s aides, he befriended Jaunpur bahubali Vinod Nate, guru of slain gangster Munna Bajrangi, who was preparing to fight elections from Jaunpur’s Rari (now Malhani) assembly constituency.
However, Nate’s death in a road accident before the 2002 UP assembly elections gave Dhananjay a chance to debut into the political arena and he fought the election as an independent candidate, garnering sympathy votes by placing deceased Nate’s photograph close to his chest while canvassing.
He subsequently joined the JD(U) and became the party’s face in east UP and went on to win another assembly election from Rari in 2007, but this time on a JD(U) ticket.
His meteoric rise in politics came when he joined the BSP in 2009 and entered Parliament after defeating sitting Jaunpur MP and SP stalwart Parasnath Yadav.
That election attracted the attention of national media after the body of an Indian Justice Party candidate Bahadur Sonkar was found hanging from a tree and his family alleged Singh’s hand in the incident.
“When you walk the path of crime, several politicians try to use you. This is what happened in Dhananjay’s case too. He enjoyed political patronage,” said Phool Chand Yadav, recounting how Singh became a “mananiya sansad” (respected parliamentarian) from the “most wanted”.
After a prolonged struggle by Phool Chand’s family and SP patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav vociferously raising the issue of the alleged fake encounter of Om Prakash and three others by the Bhadohi police in 1998, the then Kalyan Singh government in 1999 ordered a probe by the criminal investigation department into the case. The probe team concluded that the encounter was fake.
Meanwhile, Singh’s tryst with crime continued even after his ascent to political power and several cases were lodged against him even after he became an MP.
Two marriages that ended and a third wedding in Paris
While his political career was full of controversies, Singh’s personal life too remained a subject of media attention.
In December 2006, Singh married his first wife Meenu, who was found dead under suspicious circumstances just nine months after the wedding. While her family members claimed it was a suicide, the police had initially suspected foul play in the death.
Less than two years later, Singh married Jagriti Singh, a doctor who worked at Delhi’s RML hospital as an orthodontist. But the marriage ended on an acrimonious note.
Jagriti had contested the state assembly election in 2012 from Malhani seat as an independent candidate after her father-in-law Rajdeo Singh was denied a ticket by the BSP.
In 2013, Jagriti was arrested by the Delhi Police for allegedly torturing and beating her maid to death while Singh was arrested for allegedly tampering with the CCTV footage of the incident. In 2017, the couple got divorced.
The same year, Dhananjay married Shrikala Reddy, daughter of former MLA from Telangana’s Kodad seat, K. Jitender Reddy, in Paris.
In July 2021, Shrikala became the chairperson of the 83-member district panchayat of Jaunpur.
According to political analysts, Shrikala may dent some of the vote-share of the BJP candidate if she decides to fight the Lok Sabha election from Jaunpur.
“Dhananjay does wield some influence over the Jaunpur populace but voters too have become more aware now. In case Shrikala fights the election, she may be able to take away some of the votes but that doesn’t mean that she can register a win. Had it been Dhananjay himself in the fray, he may have been able to garner more votes,” Shashikant Pandey, head of the department of political science, Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University, told ThePrint.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)