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26-04-2023
Bureau Report + Agencies
NEW DELHI: On April 15, former Indian parliamentarian Atiq Ahmed and his brother Ashraf Ahmed were shot dead by three assailants, a brazen attack caught on live television. The two were being escorted by the police in the northern city of Prayagraj in Uttar Pradesh state for a “routine medical checkup” late that night when a group of journalists stopped them.
As soon as the brothers started talking to the reporters, the three suspected attackers, allegedly posing as journalists, fired multiple shots, killing the gangster-politician and his brother on the spot.
The attackers surrendered to the police, chanting “Jai Shri Ram” (Hail Lord Ram), a religious slogan that has now become a war cry for Hindu groups in their campaign against India’s Muslim minority.
Police claim the three attackers identified as Mohit alias Sunny Puraney, 23; Lavlesh Tiwari, 22; and Arun Kumar Maurya, 18, “wanted to finish the gang of Atiq and Ashraf and become famous”.
Mohit, a college dropout from Hamirpur, reportedly has a dozen criminal cases against him and is a declared “habitual offender”. The police claim that he was the central figure who planned the operation and was earlier jailed in multiple cases, including attempted murder and robbery.
The Facebook page of the second attacker, Tiwari, suggests he is a member of the far-right Hindu organization Bajrang Dal. Residents of his village said “he had big ambitions in the world of crime”. He too faces four cases with charges of assault, harassment of women and smuggling of illicit liquor.
Maurya, the youngest of the three, was reportedly introduced to the world of crime by Mohit when they met in Panipat, a town in Haryana state. An orphan child, little is known or reported about him.
Atiq, 60, was a six-term legislator, including one term in the national parliament. He successfully contested five state assembly elections from Allahabad (now called Prayagraj) West constituency thrice as an independent candidate, once as a Samajwadi Party leader, and once as a candidate of his own Apna Dal party. The sixth time, Atiq contested the 2004 general elections on a Samajwadi Party ticket and became a member of parliament.
He was also a gangster with more than 100 legal cases against him, including murders, kidnapping and extortion. He was convicted and jailed in 2019 for kidnapping a lawyer, Umesh Pal, who had testified against him in a 2005 murder case of a local legislator named Raju Pal.
Umesh Pal was murdered in February this year. Police suspected Atiq’s 19-year-old son Asad Ahmed’s role in the murder. Incidentally, Asad, along with his aide Ghulam Hussain, was shot dead by the Uttar Pradesh police in another encounter only two days before Atiq’s murder. That, along with Atiq’s killing which opposition parties allege 
was “scripted” has reignited human rights concerns over a growing trend of extrajudicial killings as a strategy of governance in Uttar Pradesh.
Since 2017, when hardline Hindu monk Yogi Adityanath of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) became the chief minister, the state has witnessed 10,900 police encounters, in which at least 183 people died and close to 5,000 others were injured, according to police data.
Political parties opposed to the BJP have accused Adityanath of subverting the rule of law and targeting minority communities by using the police.
The Uttar Pradesh police’s data shows such “encounters” disproportionately affect Muslims and other marginalized communities, during 2017 to 2020, 37 percent of those killed in such incidents were Muslims, nearly twice the percentage of their population in the state.
