How crime charts course for 2 political families

Two political families that allowed them to be pulled into the vortex of crime have finally been demolished by crime. Mafia don-turned-politicians D.P. Yadav and Amar Mani Tripathi may have little in common otherwise but their fate seems to be locked by strange coincidences.

On Monday, both their sons made news for all the wrong reasons — D.P. Yadav’s son, Vikas, was given a 25-year-jail for the murder of Nitish Katara and Amar Mani Tripathi’s son, Aman, set off a fresh round of war in the SP after he was given an Assembly ticket by the party. Aman is facing a CBI inquiry for the alleged murder of his wife Sara.

The Delhi police arrested D.P. Yadav in July in a case under the MCOCA registered against him in 2015 over a betting racket. Amar Mani Tripathi and his wife Madhu Mani are serving life sentence in a Gorakhpur jail for the murder of a poetess, Madhumita Shukla, in 2003. Both, Mr Tripathi and Mr Yadav had humble beginnings.

Mr Yadav initially worked in his father’s dairy business and then began dabbling in illicit liquor trade. He made a debut in politics in 1987 when he became block pramukh of Bisrakh village in Ghaziabad. Mr Yadav’s fortunes rose — both in the underworld and in politics as he became a legislator and then member of Parliament in 2004. He walked in and out of the BJP and SP, and finally formed his own Rashtriya Parivartan Dal.

Mr Tripathi was initially a member of the erstwhile Hari Shankar Tiwari gang of eastern UP. He became MLA for the first time in 1989 when he contested as a Congress candidate. He was instrumental in splitting the Congress in 1997 to become minister in the BJP government. He then moved to the SP, then the BSP and back to the SP till he was arrested by the CBI in September 2003 and then convicted in 2007.

Both the sons of these dons-turned-politicians are also strikingly similar. They are young, good-looking men with ample cash and cartridges in their pockets.