The Rise and Fall of Atiq Ahmed: India’s Notorious Political Gangster

Atiq Ahmed, one of India’s most feared political gangsters, was shot dead last month along with his brother during a television broadcast outside a hospital.

For over 40 years, the son of a horse-drawn carriage driver and a stay-at-home mother dominated the criminal underworld of a sleepy town located at the confluence of the Ganges and the Yamuna, two of the holiest rivers in the country.

Ahmed, a burly man with a mustache and a characteristic white turban, moved between two realities.

At home, he was a loving father to his five children, kept pedigree dogs, threw lavish parties, and organized mushairas (poetry recitals) for their friends. It was even attended by a respected Bollywood lyricist.

Abroad, he seized property and businesses, extorted businessmen, wrote fake checks for purchases, and got his rivals beaten up in jail.

Many police officers and politicians sided with him and helped him.

Even the courts were cautious: in 2012, ten Supreme Court judges recused themselves from a hearing in which it was decided whether to grant him bail.

criminal history

Ahmed had a long resume in the police files. He was the ringleader of the so-called “Interstate 227 gang” and had accumulated almost 100 cases, including murders and kidnappings.

Much of the time he had remained a fugitive, but in full view of all.

The actual number of Ahmed’s crimes is higher because “People feared him and did not report hundreds of cases”says Lalji Shukla, a former senior police officer in Prayagraj, a town located in the south of the state of Uttar Pradesh.

He often spent time in jail as a remand prisoner for his illegal activities, but he kept at it, frequently summoning his rivals and businessmen to jail to extort money from them, ordering them to be beaten up, and even released videos of his mistreatment as evidence of his continued dominance.

However, it was not until March of this year that Ahmed was found guilty in a kidnapping case and sentenced to life in prison, the first time he was sentenced. Shukla attributes this delay to Ahmed knowing “how to run the system”.

“He frequently missed court appointments and threatened witnesses. Some who were not afraid of him ended up getting tired after many years of appearances ”, he affirms.

But a few days after the conviction, on the night of April 15, it all ended in a rather tragic way.

Ahmed and his brother were shot at point-blank range in a television broadcast outside a hospital in Prayagraj.in the presence of more than a dozen armed police officers.

The brothers were in police custody and were speaking to reporters as they went for a routine medical examination.

Police detained three men who they said killed the brothers because they wanted to “make a name for themselves in the criminal world.” The murders shocked the country and the state government ordered an investigation.

“No mafia can spread terror in Uttar Pradesh anymore”, declared days after the assassination Yogi Adityanath, chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, governed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He did not directly mention Ahmed.

His political career

Atiq Ahmed was born in a Muslim neighborhood of Prayagraj in 1962. Not much is known about his early years, except that he dropped out of high school and turned to petty crime.

Over the next decade, he worked his way up as a gangster, police say.

He stole scrap metal from rail yards, won public contracts by threatening rival contractors, and usurped land and property from others..

He also joined a gang led by a gangster turned city councilor named Shauq Ilahi, popularly known as Chand Baba.

In 1989, Ahmed began a political career.

“Judging by the long list of criminal cases in which he was accused, Ahmed was just as skilled running a criminal enterprise as he was serving his constituency.wrote Milan Vaishnav in his book When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics.

Vaishnav, a political scientist, provides a vivid vignette of Ahmed’s life as a politician.

Gangsters like Ahmed joined political parties, or formed their own, mainly to protect themselves.. From 1989 to 2002, she won the same Prayagraj seat for five consecutive terms.

Starting out as an independent candidate, he later became the leader of the influential regional Samajwadi party. Ultimately, he joined the Apna Dal, a minority party formed by a lower caste leader.

“Locals marveled at this weekly assembly, where Ahmed, with one ear glued to his mobile phone and the other responding to constituency service requests, muttered orders to his personal assistant or stenographer,” Vaishnav wrote.

“The party headquarters where Ahmed often met was more like an armory than an administrative office, with the walls impressively lined with imported automatic weapons”.

He compared himself to Mandela

At public meetings, Ahmed took over the crowds and talked like a shrewd politician. It made reference to equality, secularism, social justice and girls’ education.

“Education is the greatest love you can give to your children,” he told a cheering crowd many years ago.

When asked by journalists about his criminal record, Ahmed reminded them that a court had annulled a record 123 cases against him in a single day.

“Has it happened anywhere else in the world that I was faced with so many false cases?” he asked a journalist.

Ahmed presented himself as a sacrificial figure in politicsstating that he had little personal life because he worked for the town.

“He gave money to the poor to pay their medical bills, send their children to school. He helped Hindus and Muslims alike. But he was not at all charitable. It was about cultivating an image, like other gangster-politicians do,” says Anupam Mishra, editor of The Leadera prominent Prayagraj newspaper.

He even compared himself to Nelson Mandela., stating that the revered statesman also “spent 27 years in jail.” “Mandela was once the most wanted man. He then became the most respected ruler of his country, ”he observed.

Ahmed consolidated his political power between 2003 and 2007.

But just before Samajwadi Party rule ended and new elections were called in 2007, a horrifying case marked his downfall and seemed to cause him to fall out of favor with the Muslims in his constituency: two girls were kidnapped in a madrasa and gang raped.

This caused immense outrage in the community with many pointing fingers at Ahmed and his men, even though the gangster’s name was not mentioned in the police complaint.

“Since this incident, Ahmed has lost the goodwill of his community, which was his largest electoral bloc.”, says Zeeshan Ali, a relative of Ahmed.

Two years later, Ahmed lost his seat in Parliament. He never won an election again.

But he kept running for office, in and out of jail, and maintaining his influence in the world of crime.

In 2017, Adityanath’s BJP government came to power. Since then, Ahmed spent most of his time in jail..

Out of favor

The cycle of violence and reprisals unleashed by Ahmed continued after his imprisonment.

On a warm February afternoon, Umesh Pal – a lawyer and key witness in the 2005 murder of Raju Pal – was shot dead outside his home by gunmen suspected of belonging to Ahmed’s gang.

Police then killed Ahmed’s son, Asad, a law student, who was allegedly seen on CCTV recording shooting at Umesh Pal and named as a defendant in the murder.

By then, Ahmed had fallen out of favor.

The police declared that they had confiscated and demolished the gangster’s properties – houses, offices, businesses – worth nearly Rs 10 billion (US$121 million).

Three months later, Ahmed himself met a dire fate.

Did someone order his murder? Nobody knows for sure. An epilogue on Prayagraj’s seething underworld is yet to be written.

* Additional reporting by Ankit Srinivas on Prayagraj.

BBC Mundo