Mukhtar Ansari  Mukhtar Ansari (born 30 June 1963)  is a politician and gang leader from Uttar Pradesh. He has been elected as a Member of the Legislative Assembly from the Mau constituency a record five times. He was the prime accused in the Krishnanand Rai murder case among other crimes, and spent 13 years in jail. He was released on 3 July 2019, after witnesses against him turned hostile. Ansari won his first Assembly election as a candidate of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), and the next two as an independent. In 2007, he joined BSP and unsuccessfully contested the 2009 Lok Sabha election. After BSP expelled him in 2010 for criminal activities, he formed his own party Quami Ekta Dal with his brothers. He won from the Mau seat in the 2012 Uttar Pradesh legislative assembly election. He merged Quami Ekta Dal with BSP in 2017, and won the state elections as a BSP candidate. He was acquitted by Special CBI Court in Murder charges of Former BJP MLA Krishnand Rai. Mukhtar Ansari is the grandson of Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari, an early president of the Indian National Congress. In the early 1970s, the government commissioned several development projects in the backward Poorvanchal area. This resulted in the rise of organised gangs that competed with each other to grab the contracts for these projects. Mukhtar Ansari was originally a member of the Makhanu Singh gang. In the 1980s, this gang clashed with another gang led by Sahib Singh, over a plot of land in Saidpur, resulting in a series of violent incidents. Brijesh Singh, a member of Sahib Singh's gang, later formed his own gang and took over Ghazipur's contract work mafia in the 1990s. Ansari's gang competed with him for the control of the 100 crore contract business, which spanned areas such as coal mining, railway construction, scrap disposal, public works and liquor business. The gangs were also involved in running protection ("goonda tax") and extortion rackets, besides other criminal activities such as kidnapping. By the early 1990s, Mukhtar Ansari was well known for his criminal activities, especially in the districts of Mau, Ghazipur, Varanasi and Jaunpur. He entered politics around 1995, became an MLA in 1996, and started challenging Brijesh Singh's dominance. The two became the main gang rivals in the Poorvanchal region. In 2002, Singh ambushed Ansari's convoy.