For the dozen-odd UP legislators who are in jail on various charges, the ongoing Budget Session has not offered any respite.
Barring Mukhtar Ansari, who has obtained court permission, not even a single jailed MLA has been able to attend the budget session. Ansari is currently in jail on charges of murder of BJP MLA Krishnanand Rai.
“Most of the legislators have not even sought permission this time and the government, which now enjoys a comfortable majority, is not too keen to ensure the presence of jailed BSP MLAs in the house either. There is no question of opposing the permission since no application has been moved by the jailed legislators,” said a government standing counsel.
Majority of the jailed legislators have already spent considerable time behind the bars.
Amarmani Tripathi, convicted for the murder of a poetess Madhumita Shukla, has been in jail since 2003 and won the 2007 Assembly polls on a Samajwadi ticket.
Anand Sen Yadav of the BSP has also been in jail since 2007 when he was arrested for conspiring the kidnapping and murder of his pregnant girlfriend. He has since been lodged in Faizabad jail. Mukhtar Ansari has also been behind the bars since 2005 and is currently lodged in Agra jail. He won as an Independent from Mau in 2007 and even contested the 2009 Lok Sabha elections on a BSP ticket from Varanasi.
Shekhar Tiwari, BSP MLA from Aurraiya, has been in jail since December 2008 after he allegedly lynched a PWD engineer who had refused to pay money for chief minister Mayawati’s birthday funds. Guddu Pandit, BSP MLA from Dibai, is in jail for kidnapping voters in panchayat elections and has now been booked under the Gangster’s Act.
Independent MLA Raja Bhaiyya, along with SP MLA Vinod Kumar, SP MLC Akshay Pratap Singh and SP MP Shailendra Kumar, is in Bareilly jail for threatening and intimidating a candidate in the panchayat polls.
These leaders have been booked under the Gangster’s Act too which makes their release difficult.
Purshottam Naresh Dwiwedi, BSP MLA from Naraini in Banda district, is another legislator languishing in jail on charges of illegally detaining and raping a minor dalit girl. The Banda rape case has attracted national headlines and Dwiwedi, despite ill health, has not got any respite from the court.
Vijay Misra, SP MLA, is another legislator who was arrested from Delhi on charges of planning a bomb attack on UP minister Nand Gopal Nandi.
“Since Assembly elections are barely a year away, most of the MLAs have not even bothered to put in an application for attending the session,” said a senior police official.