Hari Shankar Tiwari

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Hari Shankar Tiwari is an Indian criminal-politician from Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh. He was originally with the Indian National Congress political party, but has changed parties several times opportunistically. Before joining politics, he was an established gang leader - he has been implicated or indited in over 37 cases of murder alone.^[1] However, it appears that the case files regarding these charges keep getting "lost" by the prosecution^[2].

In the 1982 U.P. State Elections, he was one of the first Indian politicians (along with Ravindra Shahi) to win an election from behind bars^[3]. It is this creative act that exposed the weakness of the Indian legal system - one is held not guilty until one is convicted, and one may fight elections even from behind bars, so long as there is no major conviction (up to two years of a jail sentence). Most criminal-politicians in India today may owe their ancestry to Hari Shankar Tiwari.

Tiwari is also a shrewd manipulator, and his lack of ideological baggage results in his being influential in propping up governments, especially in hung parliaments. Despite his criminal background, he has been a cabinet minister at the State Assembly in several governments, including the Kalyan Singh (Bharatiya Janata Party) government (1997-1999), when he was charged with forcibly acquiring the property of a widow in Gorakhpur and a retired army officer in Lucknow, though later in both cases he was cleared of the charges^[4]. He was also a minister in the Mulayam Singh Yadav (Samajwadi Party) government (2003-2007).

It is alleged that several other criminal-politicians were not nurtured by Hari Shankar Tiwari. Prominent among them is Amarmani Tripathi, powerful minister under Mulayam Singh Yadav, who is currently on jail for the murder of poetess Madhumita Shukla. Before he entered politics, Tripathi was listed in police records as a "Category A history-sheeter" with 33 criminal cases pending against him, including five relating to murder^[4]. He was described as a "member of Hari Shankar Tiwari's gang". Others associated with him include the gangster Sriprakash Shukla, gunned down by the police in 1998.