Former gangster Mukhtar Ansari refused bail for campaign in UP
NEW DELHI: The Delhi high court on Monday refused parole to gangster-turned-politician Mukhtar Ansari to campaign in the ongoing Uttar Pradesh elections.
Justice Mukta Gupta accepted the Election Commission’s (EC) plea to cancel parole granted to Ansari who is the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) candidate from the Mau Sadar constituency. The UP government, too, had opposed the relief granted to the MLA by a trial court.
Mau Sadar goes to the polls on March 4, the sixth and secondlast phase of voting in UP.
“When a person in custody fills up a nomination for candidature, he does not get a vested right to be released for canvassing,” the judge said, adding Ansari’s release till March 4, from 7am to 8pm, was “akin to a temporary bail”.
“The impugned order is thus ex-facie illegal and is set aside on this count itself,” she said.
Ansari’s release would come in the way of free and fair election, the EC told the court following which it stayed the trial court order on February 17.
The UP government and the complainant in the murder case also moved the HC, opposing Ansari’s release from a Lucknow jail, saying he might influence witnesses in the 2005 murder case of BJP MLA Krishnanand Rai in which he is facing trial.
A four-time legislator from Mau Sadar, Ansari is in jail since 2005. He has more than 40 criminal cases, including those of murder and kidnapping, against him. His counsel told the HC that the representation of the people act gave Ansari the right to contest election as well as campaign.
The poll panel said there was a huge deployment of police across the state for the polls and it couldn’t spare personnel to guard Ansari . The UP government also expressed its inability to provide police cover. LUCKNOW /ALLAHABAD/ RAE BARELI/ VARANASI: At tier two, Brahmins are in the forefront of the hugely OBCised Bharatiya Janata Party’s campaign in Uttar Pradesh.
They’re without a leader or a party they can truly call their own. What keeps them going is their resolve, their fears and the flair for social stewardship.
I spent considerable time decoding the trend during my 10-day tour of the state.
The answers that seem valid aren’t based on empirical data. They’re a distillation of stray and considered comments on the ground.
The most telling insight was of Gulab Pandey, who once distributed the HT group’s Hindustan newspaper in Varanasi.
The Brahmins voted for the SP in 2012 but were given a short shrift.
The party’s treatment of the community was no better than the BSP’s that got a majority of its own in the 2005 polls. “Pichli baar Mayawati to patkhani di thei, iss baar Akhilesh ko dengey,” declared Pandey.
That leaves the Brahmins with just the BJP’s Hindutva with a pro-backward caste tilt. Its leaders, especially Narendra Modi, invoke socialist icon Ram Manohar Lohia, a Bania who first tried organising the middle classes to beat the Nehruvian Congress’ since decimated DalitBrahmin-Muslim compact.
Modi’s BJP has been downplaying its Brahminical past to woo backward communities; terming the SP’s alliance with the Congress an ideological betrayal.
At Allahabad, the road-show led by Akhilesh and Rahul Gandhi made the counterpoint.
Their supporters and party cadres passed by Anand Bhawan and Swaraj Bhawan to show the alliance as recognition rather than demonisation of the Congress’ historicity.
It’s hard to tell whether the spectacle brought alive to the Brahmins their primacy in the Congress of yore. The point wasn’t entirely lost on the Allahabad electorate.
Why does the BJP’s attempted personality transplant not upset the Brahmins?
They want the SP punished and are unsure of the Congress as a socio-political sinecure. To them, Muslim consolidation was the sole motivation for the Rahul-Akhilesh entente.
Sample this: In the RajputBrahmin dominated Pratapgarh district, I ran into Hanuman Prasad Ojha. He gave the alliance a clear edge, but said as a Brahmin he won’t be on the same side as Muslims.
For such category of voter across castes, the BJP becomes attractive for not putting up any Muslim candidate.
The new acronyms, binaries and analogies the party has injected in the poll discourse are meant to bring out the latent religious divide.
On display has been a smart circumvention of the Supreme Court order that barred use of religion in politics.
The BJP leaders talked about cremation grounds and burial spaces instead of temples and mosques. Imageries changed, not the divisive agenda. The message was out by the time the EC woke up to it.
However, there are exceptions to the faintly felt majoritarian sentiment at places the alliance or the BSP have candidatures suited to proximate demography.
Example: Varanasi South where the Congress’s Rajesh Mishra, a former MP, is in a good fight with the BJP.
That brings one to a concomitant imponderable: competing social groups’ urge for local empowerment and historical settling of scores.
The second phenomenon is explained by Kurmis using the BJP in their tussle for political space with Yadavs; the first by party candidates from same caste slugging it out on micro issues.
Such intricacies give UP’s poll terrain the look of a mosaic: a study of voluble supports and eloquent silences; of helpful tailwinds, not forceful waves.