Allahabad high court sets aside afzal ansari's 4 year prison sentence allows him to retain mp seat

Allahabad high court sets aside afzal ansari's 4 year prison sentence allows him to retain mp seat

The Allahabad high court overturned the Ghazipur court's decision that sentenced Samajwadi Party MP Afzal Ansari to four years in prison under the Gangsters Act in connection with the 2005 murder of BJP MLA Krishnanand Rai.

As a result of the high court's ruling in favor of Ansari's appeal against his conviction, he can continue serving as a Member of Parliament.

The judgment, delivered by Justice S K Singh, also rejected appeals filed by the Uttar Pradesh government and Piyush Kumar Rai, son of the late Krishnanand Rai, seeking an increase in Ansari's sentence.

The Allahabad high court's decision came in response to an appeal filed by Afzal Ansari, challenging the four-year sentence imposed by the Special Court MP/MLA of Ghazipur in the Gangster Act case related to Krishnanand Rai's murder.

Justice Sanjay Kumar Singh had reserved the court's judgment on July 4 after hearing Ansari's appeal.

If the Allahabad high court had upheld the lower court's decision, Ansari would have been required to vacate his seat in Parliament. According to the Representation of the People Act, any MP or state legislator sentenced to imprisonment of two years or more shall be disqualified ‘from the date of such conviction’ and remain disqualified for an additional six years after serving their sentence.

Senior advocates Gopal Swaroop Chaturvedi and Dayashankar Mishra, along with advocate Upendra Upadhyay, argued on behalf of Afzal Ansari, saying that the action initiated against him under the Gangster Act following Krishnanand Rai's murder case was ‘illegal.’

Afzal Ansari, the brother of the late gangster-turned-politician Mukhtar Ansari, won the Ghazipur seat on a Samajwadi Party ticket in the recent Lok Sabha polls, defeating BJP's Paras Nath Rai and BSP's Umesh Kumar Singh by a margin of 1,24,861 votes.

In April 2023, the MP MLA court in Ghazipur had convicted Afzal Ansari, who was then a Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) MP, in a kidnapping and murder case related to Krishnanand Rai's killing. The court sentenced him to four years imprisonment and imposed a fine of Rs 1 lakh. The same court had also convicted Mukhtar Ansari in the case, sentencing him to 10 years imprisonment and imposing a fine of Rs 5 lakh.