As ED comes for SP leader over old case in UP, a throwback to the ‘Gangs of Gorakhpur’

Vinay is a one-time MLA, having won the Chillupar seat in Gorakhpur in the 2017 Assembly polls on a BSP ticket. In 2022, he contested as an SP candidate but lost to the BJP. This is the seat from where his late father Hari Shankar won six consecutive terms, between 1985 and 2007 – first as an Independent, three times with the Congress and twice with Congress splinter groups. He won his first election from inside jail.

Hari Shankar went on to serve as a minister, including at the Cabinet level, in governments headed by the SP, BSP as well as the BJP.

Before Hari Shankar began his career in state politics though, he made his name as a strongman in eastern UP’s Gorakhpur. There were many politicians who came from the world of crime but Hari Shankar remained its key face for decades. In his belt, many preferred to visit him for “justice” rather than approaching courts.

In the 1970s and 1980s, as a slew of leaders who had been part of the freedom struggle retired, a new generation of politicians emerged to replace them, riding on everything from caste identity to money power. In Gorakhpur, one of them was Hari Shankar.

It was a gang war between Hari Shankar and another Gorakhpur strongman-turned-politician,Virendra Pratap Shahi, that led the then Congress government to introduce the anti-gangster law in 1986, allowing for the “attachment” of property linked to gang activity with or without the cognisance of any court. The feud between the two over government contracts had by then spilled beyond Gorakhpur and led to the killings of several dozen gang members.

Santosh Bhartiya, a journalist who has covered UP extensively, including this gang war, says future CMs such as Sripati Mishra and Vir Bahadur Singh also offered them protection in the years when politics was sharply divided on caste lines. At one time in early 1980s, at least 30 UP MLAs were Hari Shankar’s sympathisers, according to Bhartiya.

When the Kalyan Singh-led BJP government came to power in 1991, it arrested several such MLAs, including Hari Shankar.

Later, the compulsions of coalition politics meant that the same BJP turned to Hari Shankar, among others, to prevent the collapse of its government in the state in 1997.

By 2007, Hari Shankar’s influence had waned – he lost the Assembly polls that year to the BSP and by 2012, had slipped to the third place in the Chillupar seat. By 2017, when the BJP sweep of the state began, Vinay had replaced his father.