Recalling The 2009 Varanasi Showdown: Don Mukhtar Ansari's Near-Victory Against BJP's Murli Manohar Joshi

Iron Maiden, the legendary heavy metal band, once sang: “The evil that men do lives on and on.” It is a karmic thought of sorts with which dreaded gangster Mukhtar Ansari, who passed away on 28 March, might not have concurred. He lived to see his criminal empire crumble to bits, and suffer being punished for his crimes.

Before Yogi Adityanath became Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh and commenced the arduous task of uprooting organised crime, Ansari was the original Ashrafi Don, who flourished for decades, courtesy flagrant political patronage from the Samajwadi Party (SP), the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), and the Congress. 

Ansari was so powerful that he contested elections successfully on multiple occasions. When the heat grew too strong for him to stand on an SP or BSP ticket, he went right ahead and floated his own political party, and won.

If he couldn’t contest, like in the 2022 assembly election, he blithely promoted his son, who won as well. If the criminalisation of politics had a face, it would be Mukhtar Ansari.

Yet his grandest moment came in the 2009 general election when he nearly defeated Murli Manohar Joshi of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the prestigious Varanasi seat. It is a story worth recounting, especially since the seat has been held for the past two terms by none other than Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The Congress party under Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh were on the hunt for a second consecutive coalition government at the Centre. Mulayam Singh Yadav, who had been dispossessed of the provincial mandate in 2007, was keen to revive the SP. The BJP hoped to resurrect its fortunes, both nationally and in Uttar Pradesh, after a long slump. 

Mayawati sought to capitalise on her party’s remarkable performance in 2007 when she managed to shape the BSP into a common political platform for Dalits, Muslims, and, hitherto unthinkable, Brahmins.

Ansari, astute as ever in reading the shifting political winds, was only too glad to contest from Varanasi on a BSP ticket.

There was also an Apna Dal factor at play in the city that year. It was a minor one, no doubt, but with enough pull to turn the contest into a messy, low-scoring, five-way battle.

The SP gave the ticket to Ajay Rai, a local Varanasi strongman whose elder brother was killed by Ansari in 1991. The BJP sent in its big hitter, Dr Murli Manohar Joshi, ostensibly to attract back the Brahmin vote.

People should have guessed what was coming when they noted the voter turnout — a meagre 43 per cent. It was almost as if no one wanted to vote for anybody. It suited Ansari just fine, as it brought his favourable demographics more into play.

No one would have thought that someone with as high a recall value as Joshi, and someone so senior, might lose in Varanasi. Yet, the fact is that he very nearly did. This is how bad the carnage was:

Joshi won in the end with a desultory 31 per cent of the popular vote, and by a narrow margin of just 2.6 per cent. Ansari came a close second with 28 per cent.

If we look at the leads of the five assembly segments which constitute the Varanasi Lok Sabha seat, the magnitude of the debacle becomes painfully acute.

In the 387-Rohaniya segment, Ansari was first, while Joshi trailed fourth (behind the BSP, the SP’s Rai, and even the Apna Dal). Joshi’s deficit was 8,992 votes.

In the 388-Varanasi North segment, Joshi gained a low lead with Ansari close behind. In the adjoining 389-Varanasi South segment, which covers the Kashi Vishwanath Temple and the left bank of the Ganga downstream of the Ghats, Joshi and the BJP improved their position slightly. But Ansari was still a firm second.

It was only in 390-Varanasi Cantt, which covers Benaras Hindu University, the densely populated Ghats, and Ramnagar across the river, that Joshi finally managed to gain a handsome lead of 20,358 votes. 

Still, Ansari came second. But then, to Joshi’s acute embarrassment, he and the BJP nearly went and lost it all in the largely rural segment of 391-Sevapuri (to the west of the city, past the swanky, new cricket stadium).

Once again, Joshi stood a poor fourth, and suffered a deficit of 17,094 votes. It was the only segment in which Rai of the SP came first. Also, in Sevapuri, the Apna Dal came second, with both candidates pushing Ansari to the third spot.

In the end, Joshi won the Varanasi parliamentary constituency by a paltry 17,211 votes, and with less than a third of the popular mandate. His blushes, and that of the BJP, were spared by a solitary assembly segment — 390 Varanasi Cantonment. 

If we want to be flippant, we can say that Joshi was saved by Vishwanath. Or that Ansari was defeated by the Army. It doesn’t matter. 

The point is that one of the senior-most leaders of the BJP, and a former president of the party, was nearly defeated by a gangster, and in Kashi of all places.

It is a perfect metaphor for everything that was wrong with the country, the province, its politics, and the BJP, and an excellent lesson on where we must never retrogress to.

Now, Ansari is no more. The least we can say is that the evil he did was interred in his bones while there was still breath in him, and before his bones were interred. There is justice in that.