Heirs to criminal empire, now at heart of remission row, why Karwaria family matters in UP politics

UP Governor Anandiben Patel has ordered the premature remission of Uday Bhan Karwaria. He is the son of Bhukkal Maharaj, who ran a criminal empire in Allahabad in the 1980s.

Uday Bhan Karwaria | X/@BJPVinodSonkar

Lucknow: Chaudhary Naunihal Singh, shortly after becoming the home minister of Uttar Pradesh in 1981, introduced Bhukkal Maharaj, the sand and real estate don who had a reputation for going underground for long periods, to the senior superintendent of police (SSP) in Allahabad.

Baffled that Naunihal Singh was singing praises of the most notorious don in Allahabad — the home district of then Chief Minister (later PM) Vishwanath Pratap Singh — SSP Haridas Rao said, “Aapki daya se maine sabse bade badmash ki shakal dekh li (due to your mercy, I was able to see the face of the biggest criminal).”

“The matter reached the CM within days, and the home department was soon snatched away from Naunihal Singh, and he was made the education minister instead. Vishwanath Singh was a strict CM,” said a now-retired senior UP police officer, speaking to ThePrint on the condition of anonymity.

Former Congress MLA Anugrah Narayan Singh told ThePrint that Vashisht Narayan Karwaria alias Bhukkal Maharaj fought an election from Allahabad (North) and another from Allahabad (South) as an Independent but lost. Later, his son, Uday Bhan Karwaria, was the first Karwaria to taste political success when he won the Bara assembly seat on a BJP ticket in 2002 and then again in 2007.

Uday Bhan is now at the center of a controversy after UP Governor Anandiben Patel ordered his premature remission from jail. He, along with his brothers Kapil Muni Karwaria and Suraj Bhan Karwaria, are currently serving life sentences in Prayagraj’s Naini central jail. The brothers were jailed in connection with the murder of Samajwadi Party (SP) MLA Jawahar Yadav alias Pandit in August 1996 — a crime in which an AK-47 was believed to have been used for the first time in Allahabad.

Patel’s order for Uday Bhan’s remission was based on a recommendation from the Prayagraj senior superintendent of police (SSP), district magistrate (DM), and his mercy petition committee on the grounds “his conduct in jail was of the highest order”.

Dated 19 July 2024, the remission order by Krishna Kumar Singh, the secretary of the jail administration and reforms department of UP, mentioned that by 31 July 2023, Uday Bhan had spent eight years, three months, and 22 days in jail.

Under Yogi 2.0, Bhan’s is the second remission to a convicted criminal within a year after the ex-Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) minister and East UP strongman, Amarmani Tripathi (66), and his wife, Madhumani (61), were similarly granted remission of sentence in August 2023. The couple had been sent to jail after their convictions in the 2003 murder of poet Madhumita Shukla (26) in Lucknow.

Alok Kumar, jailor at Naini prison, told ThePrint that they are waiting for Uday Bhan’s release order from the DM’s office, after which Uday Bhan can be set free.

Bhukkal Maharaj purportedly ran a criminal empire in Allahabad and dallied in sand mining, real estate, government contracts, land dealings — especially of disputed properties, taking possession of land, etc. He, along with his brother Shyam Narayan Karwaria alias ‘Maula Maharaj’, inherited from their father, Jagat Narayan Karwaria, the sand mining business along the Yamuna ghats, and they took it to a different level, thanks to the protection offered by the then Congress governments in the state.

Congress’s Anugrah Narayan Singh said that Jagat Narayan Karwaria also fought an election from the Sirathu assembly seat in 1967 against former CM Hemwati Nandan Bahuguna but lost. His son, Bhukkal Maharaj, though politically unsuccessful, passed on the baton to his three sons, who then went on to win elections.

The release of Brahmin strongman Uday Bhan, coming in the backdrop of the BJP’s Lok Sabha election debacle in UP, is expected to boost the party’s prospects in the Allahabad-Kaushambi-Fatehpur region, according to BJP insiders. Of the five seats in the Prayagraj region, the party lost four — Allahabad, Kaushambi, Pratapgarh, and Fatehpur — and retained only Phulpur in the recently concluded election.

Moreover, Karwaria’s release will allow a parallel power centre to develop in the region. Currently, the main face of the Prayagraj region in the Yogi Adityanath government is Deputy CM Keshav Prasad Maurya.

With Maurya seemingly needling Yogi with statements such as the “party is bigger than the government” and writing a letter to an additional chief secretary of the CM’s department on reservations, BJP insiders are looking at Karwaria’s remission as another flashpoint in the cold war between the CM and his deputy.

Speaking to ThePrint, a senior UP BJP leader from the region said, “Uday Bhan Karwaria is a strongman whose family wields sway in Prayagraj region, but there is no friendship between him and Maurya. Karwaria’s release will lead to him growing more powerful in the region — which Maurya would not like. With Karwaria’s remission, Adityanath has sent a message to Maurya.”

Plot to murder Jawahar Yadav

Speaking to ThePrint, former UP DGP Sulkhan Singh said that after the 1970s, when criminals consolidated in northern India, including UP, two gangs were the first to emerge.

“One was the Maula-Bhukkal gang in the Allahabad region while the other was the gang led by Hari Shankar Tiwari in Purvanchal. The former was active in Kaushambi, Allahabad, and Fatehpur regions and would indulge in sand mining, real estate, government contracts, property dealings, etc.,” he said.

Calling Bhukkal a street-smart criminal, former UP DGP Vikram Singh said, “While gangsters such as Atiq Ahmed and Mukhtar Ansari were larger than life, Bhukkal would simply go underground whenever the law tried to catch up with him and never rubbed the powers that be on the wrong side.”

When Jawahar Yadav arrived in Allahabad from Jaunpur and started sewing sacks to make a living, the Karwarias had not known they would soon find a challenger in him. Jawahar Yadav gradually started his mining and liquor businesses, and the rise of the SP in UP improved his prospects owing to his proximity to party founder Mulayam Singh Yadav.

When the SP formed the government in UP in 1993, Jawahar Yadav became an MLA from Jhunsi, and Mulayam famously hugged him for opening the SP’s account in the district. His business only grew from then but so did the insecurity of the Karwarias.

“Jawahar Yadav would compete with the Karwarias who felt they now had a challenger interfering in their business interests,” said ex-DGP Sulkhan Singh.

According to court records, Jawahar Yadav’s wife, Vijama Yadav, recounting the murder on the evening of 13 August 1996, said after a visit to his constituency, her husband left for home in his Maruti when his driver, Gulab Yadav, told him about a van following their car.

“As they reached the Palace Talkies in the busy Civil Lines area, the van overtook them and stopped the car in the middle of the road, and before the Maruti occupants could reposition themselves, assailants seated inside the van started spraying them with bullets,” Vijama Yadav said, according to the court records.

“Several rounds were fired from an AK-47. As far as I remember, an AK-47 had not been used in any criminal incident in Allahabad before that,” the former DGP told ThePrint. The assailants, he said, also used country-made pistols.

Jawahar Yadav, along with Gulab and passerby Kamal Kumar Dixit, were killed in the melee, while Yadav’s private gunners, Kallan Yadav and Pankaj Srivastav, were injured.

Jawahar Yadav’s brother Sulaki Yadav lodged an FIR under IPC sections 147 (rioting), 148 (rioting armed with deadly weapon), 149 (unlawful assembly), 302 (murder), 307 (attempt to murder), 34 (common intention) and 7 CLA Act against the three Karwaria brothers, uncle Shyam Narayan Karwaria, and accomplice Ram Chandra Tripathi.

Probe on back burner under BSP, BJP govts

The case, lodged when UP was under president’s rule in August 1996, saw little movement for eight years under the successive Mayawati, Kalyan Singh, Ram Prakash Gupta, and Rajnath Singh governments.

According to court records, while the probe began with the Civil Lines police station, the investigation was transferred to the Crime Branch of the Crime Investigation Department (CB-CID) on 7 September 1996 after Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) Murli Manohar Joshi, then the Allahabad MP, wrote a letter to the government with a request.

The court documents showed that the CB-CID Allahabad investigated the case from 7 September 1996 to 27 September 1996, when it was transferred again to the CB-CID Varanasi and then to the CB-CID Lucknow on 22 June 2002.

Nearly eight years after the murder, the CB-CID Lucknow completed the investigation on 20 January 2004 and filed a report under provisions of Section 173 of the CrPC 1973 before the court of a special chief judicial magistrate in Allahabad.

Vijama Yadav, court documents showed, alleged that the case remained on the back burner due to interventions by influential political figures known to the Karwaria brothers.

According to their alibi, Kapil Muni Karwaria and Ram Chandra Tripathi had even claimed in court that they were not in Allahabad at the time of the crime, and were instead attending a meeting with the then-UP BJP president, Kalraj Mishra.

Mishra had also said that Kapil Muni Karwaria and Ram Chandra Tripathi were in Lucknow with him, but the court did not accept his statement.

Crime & politics

After the court took cognisance of the case on 27 January 2004, accused Kapil Muni Karwaria filed an application on 27 July 2008 for further investigation.

On 19 November 2008, the state government ordered the CB-CID Allahabad to probe the case further, and it completed its probe on 28 October 2009, court records showed.

After the BJP returned to power in UP in 2017, Uday Bhan’s wife, Neelam Karwaria, who had become an MLA from the Meja seat on a BJP ticket in 2017, nudged the Yogi government to withdraw prosecution against her husband and other accused in the case.

Jawahar Yadav’s family has accused the government of attempting to delay justice, emphasising that it tried to withdraw criminal proceedings against the Karwaria brothers.

“Three people got killed, and it (BJP) still made the (Karwaria) family fight elections,” Yadav’s wife said.

On 17 July 2017, Neelam Karwaria pleaded to the government to withdraw the accused persons from the prosecution on several counts, according to a 2019 Allahabad High Court judgment related to this matter.

Acting on the application, the special secretary of the justice department sought a report from the Allahabad DM, who said looking into the seriousness of the case and the evidence, it would not be appropriate to withdraw the accused persons from prosecution.

The DM also sought a detailed report from the special public prosecutor and the Allahabad SSP who opined that it would not be appropriate to withdraw the prosecution given that the Supreme Court in an order passed in September 2017, had directed a trial court to decide the case within three weeks. The DM agreed with both the officers and said in his report that considering the seriousness of the case and the evidence, it would not be appropriate to withdraw the accused persons from prosecution.

Subsequently, the special secretary in the justice department demanded the case diary relating to the investigation from the Allahabad DM and received it on 20 September 2018. The state government also asked for and received copies of the statements recorded during the trial. Then, it asked for the opinion of the advocate general, who said in a written opinion that “a valid reason was made out for withdrawal from prosecution”.

Karwarias’ political success

While Vashisht Narain Karwaria and Jagat Narain Karwaria unsuccessfully dabbled in politics, Uday Bhan Karwaria, a bachelor of engineering (electronics), became the first in his family to taste success in 1996 when he became chairman of the district cooperative bank from Kaushambi.

Uday Bhan also emerged as the first family member to win elections — he won the Bara assembly seat on a BJP ticket in 2002. He won the seat again in 2007, but when it became a reserved (SC) seat in 2012, he was shifted to the Allahabad (North) seat later that year.

However, he lost that election to Anugrah Narayan Singh of the Congress.

In 2009, Uday Bhan’s elder brother, Kapil Muni Karwaria, became the Phulpur MP by fighting on a BSP ticket and defeating the then Samajwadi Party sitting MP and mafioso, Atiq Ahmed. Earlier in 2007, the third brother, Suraj Bhan, had become a BSP MLC.

While Uday Bhan Karwaria avoided appearances before the lower court hearing the murder case, he had to surrender in 2013 after the Akhilesh Yadav-led state government successfully pointed out that there was no stay on his arrest and initiated attachment of his properties in the case.

In April 2015, a district court sent Kapil Muni Karwaria and Suraj Bhan to jail when the latter was still a sitting BSP MLC.

(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)