Yogi Adityanath orders transfers of Mukhtar Ansari back to Agra Jail

NEW DELHI: Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has ordered the transfer of mafia don-turned-politician Mukhtar Ansari back to Agra jail from Lucknow jail. Mukhtar Ansari was brought to the Lucknow jail in June last year, hours after his Qaumi Ekta Dal merged with Uttar Pradesh’s then ruling Samajwadi Party.

Ansari, who has several criminal cases ranging from kidnapping to murder filed against him, had earlier this month won the election to the Mau assembly seat on a Bahujan Samaj Party ticket. Ansari had sought parole for campaigning but his plea was rejected.

“The government wishes to harass me since I am in the opposition,” Ansari said on Wednesday in the state legislative assembly, where he was attending the house proceedings on the speaker’s permission.


“They want me to be far off from my people. I will seek court’s intervention.”

The BJP-led state government had on Tuesday issued the order to transfer Ansari. But a senior official in the UP government rejected the charge. The official told ET that Ansari was just one among a dozen other prisoners in UP who have been issued transfer orders over the last two days. Last month during an election campaign in Mau, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said that a BJP government in Uttar Pradesh will not allow gangsters to have a free run from behind the bars.

Days after the BJP’s victory in the state elections, the UP Prisons Department had on March 16 moved a proposal to transfer Ansari back to the Agra jail. Ansari has been in jail for over a decade now. His transfer to the Lucknow jail last June was said to have been ordered at the behest of Samajwadi Party patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav.