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Last Updated: April 22, 2023, 15:03 IST
AAP leaders have been targeting the senior Congress leadership for Mukhtar Ansari’s relationship with them. (PTI)
The Atiq Ahmed killing seems to have rekindled the controversy with the Bhagwant Mann government refusing to pay up Rs 55 lakh incurred for legal assistance to Ansari allegedly by the previous Congress regime
Allegations of gangster-turned-politician Mukhtar Ansari having been accorded special facilities during his highly controversial 27 months in a Punjab jail have not been raked up for the first time. The charges formed one of the core accusations that came hurtling towards the then Congress government in the run-up to last year’s assembly polls.
However, the Atiq Ahmed killing seems to have rekindled the controversy with the Bhagwant Mann government refusing to pay up Rs 55 lakh incurred for legal assistance to Ansari allegedly by the previous Congress regime.
During the run-up to the 2022 assembly elections, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Punjab — while trying for a shot at power — had accused the then Amarinder Singh government of providing special facilities in Ropar jail between January 2019 and April 2021.
Sources said Ansari, though a BSP MLA, was close to many senior Delhi-based Congress leaders which ensured not only his safe passage from Ropar to Uttar Pradesh but all the facilities that were extended to him during his jail term in the Congress regime. It was alleged earlier that Ansari had connections with some state and national Congress leaders. He was behind bars in an Uttar Pradesh jail and feared elimination at the hands of the police or rival gangsters.
Intriguingly, in January 2019, Punjab Police from Mohali brought him on transit remand from the UP jail after lodging an FIR that he sought ransom of Rs 10 crore from a builder in Sector 70. What had baffled many was the sudden cropping up of a ransom case against Ansari.
A political storm was triggered yet again when during the recently concluded assembly session, education minister Harjot Singh Bains blamed then jail minister Sukhjinder Randhawa for providing special facilities to Ansari.
AAP leaders have been targeting the senior Congress leadership for Ansari’s relationship with them, even accusing the nephew of a top state leader of having close ties with Ansari.
The figure of Rs 55 lakh spent on Ansari quoted by the AAP government was also on the basis of a file which was reportedly his legal fee charged by a senior Supreme Court lawyer who was engaged by the previous Congress government to represent Ansari in the Supreme Court in April 2021. The file for clearance of this amount has been changing tables but nobody reportedly cleared it.
Questions are now being raised by the AAP government over why such a huge amount of money from the state exchequer was being spent on someone who had several criminal charges against him. By raising the issue in a rally at Jalandhar, analysts believe, the AAP was trying to corner Congress ahead of the crucial bypoll to the constituency.
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