For Mukhtar Ansari, a tall, burly politician with a bottle-brush moustache and a lurid criminal record, incarceration in a federal prison in the badlands of northern India is the next best thing to freedom.
A member of the Uttar Pradesh state legislature, Ansari has been locked up for three years, awaiting trial for nearly two dozen mafia-like crimes, including murder and gun-running. But he remained in touch with supporters prior to the recent election, in which he stood for the Varanasi seat in the nation's parliament, from his cell in the Uttar Pradesh city of Ghazipur, 70km to the east.
Dedicated campaign workers such as Lakshmi Devi, an elderly widow who thinks of the jailed candidate as a modern-day Robin Hood, were allowed to call on Ansari at any time of day. To get unfettered access to his prison cell she needed only to flash an entry permit. This is not a government-issued photo ID but a note on Ansari's personal letterhead. 'Gatekeeper Sahib,' the woman's tattered, handwritten letter says, 'do not stop auntie from coming to see me.'
The national Election Commission got wind of Ansari's cushy set-up and transferred him some 400km away to Kanpur jail for the week before voting was scheduled to start in the district he was contesting, returning him on May 6. Ansari's jailers in Kanpur were instructed to install an elaborate network of video cameras to keep track of his visitors.
Ansari's candidature is indicative of a bewildering phenomenon in the world's largest democracy; voters in India often joke they can't tell whether criminals are masquerading as politicians or vice versa. And nowhere has the system attracted more seedy characters than in Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state and one of its poorest, where, the New Delhi-based Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) says, 219 parliamentary candidates out of 1,360 in this year's election had police records. And 40 of these were in 'red alert' constituencies; where three or more candidates had a criminal record.
The Election Commission requires that all licensed weapons be submitted to the local administration during the election season. The result is scores of illegal gun shops run under the patronage of local politicians, including Ansari - who faces charges under Uttar Pradesh's Gangster Act and its Arms Act - open across the state. Last year, more than 12,000 arrests were made in connection with the manufacture or possession of illegal firearms in western Uttar Pradesh alone and police officials say that orders were most frequently placed by gangs acting on behalf of candidates and their supporters. The guns are used to intimidate voters and to enforce extortion that raises money for election campaigns. On occasion they are used to capture polling booths.
Some of Ansari's henchmen were arrested last year under the Uttar Pradesh Arms Act. The men are alleged to have been on 'extortion patrol', shaking down businesses in a convoy of five sports utility vehicles, in which police found five revolvers, four rifles, a double-barrelled shotgun, 118 cartridges and 32 mobile phones.