The Strongmen's Children: How Legacies Of The Past Haunt Candidates In Bihar Elections

Union Home Minister Amit Shah, as a star campaigner of the ruling alliance in Bihar, has repeatedly invoked the imagery of ‘Jungle Raj’ that will result if the RJD comes to power. In particular, fingers have been pointed at Osama Shahab, son of deceased RJD leader and strongman Mohammad Shahabuddin, who has been given a ticket from Raghunathpur constituency in Siwan and Shivani Shukla, daughter of Munna Shukla, who has been given a ticket from Lalganj assembly constituency in Vaishali.

The political hypocrisy of this—that the BJP and JD(U) have themselves given tickets to kith and kin of convicted criminals while decrying the fact that the RJD is doing the same—is nothing new. What does call for comment is the ushering in of a new era in recent years, where criminality of a political opponent is automatically attributed to his family.

At the height of the era of the permissibility of criminality in politics, persons accused and even convicted of heinous crimes entered politics, contested elections from jail and conducted public affairs from jail with intervals of furlough. Then the Supreme Court intervened and, in the Lily Thomas judgement in 2013, directed that disqualification would take effect immediately upon conviction, and wouldn’t be placed in abeyance simply on account of pendency of the appeal unless the conviction was specifically stayed by the appellate court. As a result, under Section 8 of the Representation of the People Act, 1951, a legislator convicted for six months or more for one of the heinous offences mentioned in the section, or for any other offence with a punishment of over two years, stands immediately disqualified from being a public representative. This moved the scene of political battle to the courtroom as the political dividend of procuring the conviction of an opponent grew.

As more and more politicians are disqualified from being MPs and MLAs, the immediate solution that presents itself is contesting elections by proxy, for while politics is passed around like a family heirloom, the law does not see criminality as heritable or attributable by familial ties.

The playbook already existed in the example of Rabri Devi, who had emerged from the kitchen to become the Chief Minister of Bihar when her husband and then Chief Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav was arrested in the fodder scam case in 1997. Convicted criminals now just pass on the baton to their wives, sons and daughters to contest elections, while they themselves remain in the background.

The rise of the BJP’s power in the last decade has brought with it another phenomenon—an extra-legal solution to the problem of proxy candidates—of immediate family members of jailed politicians being made co-accused with them in their criminal cases so that they suffer the same legal fate as their political kin. The old-school code of leaving women and children of enemies alone has been cast aside for good, replaced by a culture of seeing women of the family in particular as softer targets through whom the armour of even the hard of heart and thick of skin can be pierced. Examples of this abound, and while each of these cases are sub judice in various courts, the pattern that emerges from simply enlisting facts that are known today makes it seem that it is by method more than mere coincidence.

Take the case of Atiq Ahmad, the famed Bahubali from Allahabad and former MP from the Samajwadi Party, who, along with his brother Ashraf, was assassinated on live television while in police custody. Atiq and Ashraf were arrested in connection with the murder of Bahujan Samaj Party MLA Raju Pal, and thereafter of Umesh Pal, an eyewitness in the case.

Of Atiq’s five sons, the three elder sons—Asad, Umar and Ali—were made co-accused in the Umesh Pal murder case. Asad, after suddenly going missing, was claimed by the police to have been shot dead in an ‘encounter’. Umar and Ali were arrested and are still in custody in connection with the case. Atiq’s wife, Shaista Parveen, has also been made a co-accused in the same case and is said to be absconding, with a bounty on her head. Atiq’s remaining sons, Ahzam (then 17) and Aban (then 15) were minors and were therefore immune from being implicated in any criminal cases. However, with their entire family killed, arrested or absconding, the two minor boys were picked up and brought before the Child Welfare Committee, saying they were unaccompanied minors found wandering around with no guardian coming forward to take charge of them, and were placed in a juvenile justice home.

Ashraf’s wife, Zainab Fatima, approached the Child Welfare Committee for their custody but was soon thereafter found upon ‘further investigation’ to be involved in the conspiracy to murder Umesh Pal and was added as a co-accused in the murder case. After this, Atiq’s sister, Aisha Noori, approached the court for the custody of her nephews, but immediately thereafter, she and her husband were also added as accused in the Umesh Pal murder case and her husband, Ikhlaq Ahmad, was arrested. She was thus forced to withdraw from the proceedings. Another of Atiq’s sisters, Shaheen Ahmed, filed a petition before the Allahabad High Court for being granted custody of the two minor boys, but an FIR came to be filed shortly thereafter against her, her husband, Mohammad Ahmad, and her son, Zaka Ahmad, for extortion. She, too, then withdrew from the proceedings. It was only upon the intervention of the Supreme Court that the two boys were finally released to the custody of Atiq’s remaining sister, Parveen Qureshi.

Another ready example is of Mukhtar Ansari, the now deceased politician and famed Bahubali from Mau in Eastern Uttar Pradesh. Mukhtar had been in jail for several years and was incarcerated in Congress-ruled Punjab when the Yogi Adityanath government came to power in Uttar Pradesh in 2017. The State of UP filed a petition under Article 32 of the Constitution (a right typically available only to citizens against the government) against the State of Punjab demanding his transfer to UP. The Supreme Court entertained the petition and, in 2021, ordered that Mukhtar be transferred to UP. A petition was filed by his son, Umar Ansari, before the Supreme Court in December 2023, alleging that they had received information that there was a plot to murder Mukhtar in jail in the run-up to the General Elections in May 2024. The Supreme Court called for a reply from the State, and while the matter was pending, Mukhtar Ansari was said by the jail authorities to have died of cardiac arrest in March 2024. Thereafter, though Umar demanded an impartial investigation into the circumstances of his death, the State of UP took the position that the petition had become infructuous and served no purpose as the subject is no more, and the Supreme Court dismissed the petition on this ground.

Meanwhile, in 2019, Mukhtar’s wife Afshan was made a co-accused with him in some cases and is since absconding with a look-out notice in her name and a bounty on her head. Their two sons, Abbas and Umar, have had various FIRs filed against them since 2019, including being implicated as co-accused with their father in some of his cases. Abbas, a shooter on India’s trap shooting team, was originally arrested in connection with a case of illegal possession of firearms.

When it was found that as an international shooter, he was entitled to possession of eight weapons and the guns were licensed and used for sport, the State alleged, among other things, that the cartridges recovered from him were full metal jacket cartridges, which are not permitted for use under the rules followed for the sport in the Olympic Games and other international competitions. Needless to point out that this argument glosses over the fact that a potential Olympic rules violation which has not yet occurred is not, at least so far, an offence under our applicable laws, even in Uttar Pradesh. Finally, Abbas was released after two and a half years in jail after obtaining bail from the Supreme Court in this as well as various other cases, including one of money laundering where the allegation against him is that the pocket money given to him by his mother was ill gotten gains of her crimes and he was laundering it by spending it on food, clothes, shoes, sports equipment and car accessories, and another where he is accused of conspiring with his father in illegally wrangling property from the hands of the Custodian of Enemy Property in 1973—a time when Mukhtar Ansari was six years old, and his sons were still a smile on their mother’s lips.

While Abbas was still in jail, his wife, Nikhat, too, was arrested when she went to visit him in Chitrakoot jail on the allegation that she was allowed to enter without signing the visitor’s book or surrendering her phone and bribed jail officials to allow her private time with her husband. She remained in jail for eight months until the Supreme Court ordered her release.

Most recently, Abbas was convicted of the offence of threatening a public servant. The case concerns an election speech where he is alleged to have said that officials in the State who were doing the government’s bidding would be called to account (“hisaab kitab hoga”) if the Samajwadi Party came to power. This, the trial court seems to believe, amounted to threatening all public servants in UP. Abbas, thus, stood disqualified under the Representation of the People Act, 1951, and consequently, his assembly seat of Mau was immediately declared vacant, to be filled by a by-election. Mukhtar’s younger son, Umar—the likely candidate from the family in the event of a by-election—was immediately arrested in a late night ‘raid’ in relation to an FIR for forgery. The FIR was filed, saying an application filed by his mother in some case carried her signature, but since she was absconding and it was unlikely that a hardened criminal like her would take the risk of coming out of hiding to sign an application, her signature was most likely forged by Umar. Abbas’s conviction was subsequently stayed by the Allahabad High Court, and his legislative assembly membership was restored. As such, the by-election was rendered no longer necessary and co-incidentally, Umar was released on bail soon thereafter.

Similar is the case of Azam Khan, who has been accused in close to a hundred FIRs since the BJP government came to power in 2017, with his wife, Tazeen Fatima, and son, Abdullah Azam Khan, being made co-accused in several of them. The charges vary widely from forgery and land grabbing to entering into a conspiracy for stealing a goat, stealing a buffalo, robbing an old woman of her jewellery, robbing a man of Rs 16,500, stealing books from a madrasa and stealing a sweeping machine from the municipal corporation. Several of the FIRs have been filed with inordinate delay, with one of the FIRs having been filed with a delay of 16 years and 27 of the FIRs having been filed 13 years after the alleged cause of action. Multiple FIRs are lodged with the same cause of action serving only to increase multiplicity of proceedings. The three have been in and out of jail since 2019, and presently stand disqualified from contesting elections as per the election law on account of having been convicted in some of these cases. As a result, the Parliament as well as the Assembly seats in Rampur, the family’s traditional stronghold, have gone out of the family, with the Rampur seat being won by the BJP for the first time in election history.

From a perusal of the facts stated above, it emerges that either crime too, like politics, has become a family enterprise, or that the era of rule by proxy has been succeeded by the dawn of an era of politics as a family feud with no rules of honour to the effect that women and children must be left alone. So perhaps the BJP can do with being reminded that Jungle Raj lies not simply in children taking the place of their fathers in the circle of life, but in wild beasts mauling the offspring of their rivals when a pride or territory is taken over, so that the next generation of opposition can be nipped in the bud.

(Views expressed are personal)

Saiyyad Mohammad Nizamuddin Pasha is a Delhi-based lawyer

This story appeared in print as 'Honour Thy Father' in Outlook’s November 21 issue Solitude Of Power, in which we trace Bihar’s enduring political grammar, where caste equations remain constant, alliances shift like sand, and one man’s survival instinct continues to shape the state’s destiny.