Mukhtar Ansari: … and his journey from grandson of heroes to a dreaded gangster

Mukhtar did his graduation in Arts from Ghazipur and his postgraduation from Varanasi. At over six feet in height, Mukhtar was known as a good football player in his college days and was popular both inside and outside campus.

He would regularly get into fights for his friends, and soon, this attracted the attention of underworld dons like Hari Shanker Tiwari of Gorakhpur, and later, Makhanu Singh, whose gang was active in Varanasi and adjoining districts. Eventually, he became Makhnu Singh’s most trusted aide.

During the early 1980s, there was another strongman in the Varanasi region, known as Sahib Singh, who was a rival of Makhnu Singh. Both had similar business interests in coal, scrap, and sand mining.

Mukhtar’s full-fledged entry into the underworld began when he developed a personal rivalry with Sahib Singh’s confidant Arun Singh, alias Brijesh Singh. The latter had committed eight murders by late 1980s.

The early 1990s saw a new age of powerful dons emerging in eastern UP, with Mukhtar Ansari and Brijesh Singh capturing all major underworld activities in the area, including extortion, coal contracts, scrap contracts, railway contracts, liquor contracts, and also kidnapping for ransom. When Brijesh later spread his network to what is now Jharkhand (then a part of Bihar) with the coal mining business and began to focus his operations there, Mukhtar spread his business interest to Haryana, Delhi, and Punjab. The top gangsters of Haryana and Punjab had by then joined forces with Mukhtar.

Although Brijesh Singh shifted base to Jharkhand and later to Odisha, the war between his gang and Mukhtar’s continued to rage until the 2000s. Several people with links to both gangs were killed, with the most high-profile among them then Mohammadabad MLA Krishnanand Rai, who was considered close to Brijesh Singh.