Lucknow, April 16 (). Atiq was born in 1962 in a family with a simple background. His father used to run a tonga to earn a living. His rise in life was as dramatic as his end. The story of the rise and fall of Atiq Ahmed is like a Bollywood thriller.
According to sources, Ateeq hated poverty and after failing his high school exams, he decided to deal with poverty in his own way.
He started stealing coal from trains and selling it to earn money. Soon he started threatening contractors to get government tenders for railway scrap.
In 1979, at the age of just 17, Atiq was accused of murder in Allahabad, now Prayagraj.
Soon he started running a network of many gangsters in the state. His influence gradually spread to the surrounding areas including Phulpur and Kaushambi.
In 1989, when his biggest rival Shaukat Elahi was killed in a police encounter, Atiq became the undisputed king of the underworld.
In the same year, Ateeq contested and won his first election from the Allahabad West Assembly seat as an independent candidate.
It won the seat for five consecutive terms from 1989 to 2002. First thrice as an independent, then as a Samajwadi Party candidate and finally as an Apna Dal candidate.
A year after winning as an Apna Dal candidate, Atiq went back to the Samajwadi Party and won the Phulpur Lok Sabha seat in 2004.
He had to vacate the Allahabad West assembly constituency, which led to a chain of events leading to the murder of Raju Pal. On February 24, Umesh Pal, a key witness in that incident, was killed.
Atiq was arrested in 2005 for the murder of Raju Pal and got bail after three years.
Whether in jail or out, Atiq maintained his sway over the underworld of Uttar Pradesh and ensured that his men were protected.
In 2007, while he was in jail, Atiq was accused of shielding his men who were allegedly involved in the gang rape of some girl students of a madrassa.
This sparked outrage and the Samajwadi Party expelled him.
It was about that time when BSP chief Mayawati returned to power in UP. The police put pressure on Atiq and his brother. Atiq surrendered in 2008 and went to jail.
When the Manmohan Singh government faced a no-confidence motion in Parliament after the Indo-US civil nuclear deal in 2008, crisis managers turned to some MPs jailed on serious charges.
Ateeq was one of them, who came out of jail to vote on furlough and went back to jail after supporting the UPA government.
Ateeq also lost the 2009 parliamentary elections as an Apna Dal candidate from Pratapgarh.
But the electoral defeat did not mean that its clout had waned.
In the 2012 UP assembly elections, when Mayawati was the chief minister, Atiq filed nominations from jail. He approached the Allahabad High Court for bail.
Ten judges refused to hear his bail application. The 11th judge heard his case and granted him bail. However, he lost the election to Pooja Pal, wife of Raju Pal.
Atiq was released in 2013, a year after the Samajwadi Party came to power in UP. He contested the 2014 Lok Sabha election from Shravasti as a Samajwadi Party candidate but again lost.
In December 2016, Ateeq and his associates attacked the staff of a Christian minority institution who had barred two students from taking exams after they were caught cheating. The violence was caught on camera.
In January 2017, when Akhilesh Yadav took control of the Samajwadi Party from his father Mulayam Singh Yadav, Atiq’s Samajwadi Party ties were loosened.
Akhilesh wanted to stay away from criminal-turned-politician Atiq.
The Allahabad High Court also reprimanded the UP Police for not arresting Atiq. After this Ateeq was arrested and since then Ateeq was in jail.
In March 2017, when Yogi Adityanath became the chief minister of UP in the BJP government, he promised to dismantle the empire of criminals.
Atiq was taken from his bastion Allahabad to the state’s Deoria Jail.
Atiq ran his empire in Deoria Jail and kidnapped a businessman Mohit Jaiswal and brought him to jail. He was made to sign some property papers and also thrashed mercilessly.
After this Atiq was taken to Bareilly Jail. But the jail superintendent got scared and did not want to keep him there.
In April 2019, amidst strictness, the Yogi government shifted Atiq to Naini Jail in Prayagraj.
By this time, the Supreme Court had given its verdict in the Deoria Jail case and ordered Atiq to be shifted to Sabarmati Jail in Gujarat.
Ateeq Ahmed had over 100 cases registered against him, including extortion, kidnapping and murder, but his first conviction was last month for kidnapping Umesh Pal, a witness in Raju Pal’s murder.
Ironically, the sentence was pronounced a month after the murder of Umesh Pal.
Atiq Ahmed had a symbiotic relationship between crime and politics, but he was more known for his crime than his politics.
He shrewdly used politics to protect and expand his underworld empire.
As his jail term was getting longer, Atiq got his wife Shaista Parveen to join the BSP, but as luck would have it, she was denied a ticket in the upcoming mayoral elections for being named for the murder of Umesh Pal. was given.
Atiq’s sons are also following in his footsteps.
Atiq’s eldest son Umar is currently in jail for extorting, assaulting and abducting Mohit Jaiswal, a Lucknow-based businessman, in 2018.
Umar had surrendered before the CBI in August last year. He is currently in Lucknow jail.
His other son Ali is also in jail. A case of attempt to murder has been registered against him. He recently got bail from the Allahabad High Court in that case. But another extortion case is registered against him. He is lodged in Prayagraj’s Naini Jail on charges of extorting Rs 5 crore from a property dealer in the city.
The third son Asad was killed in an encounter last week and Ateeq’s two minor sons are lodged in a juvenile shelter home.
When three youths shot dead Ateeq and his brother Ashraf in the hospital premises on Saturday night, many got a clue of the incident.
Atiq himself had feared that he would be killed in UP, but he did not expect it to happen within 72 hours after his son Asad was killed.
It is said that a bloody beginning always has a bloody end.
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