How a Modi Govt Minister, Kaushal Kishore, Again Finds Himself Linked to a Crime Story

New Delhi: This would have been a routine crime story had it not involved a murder weapon and crime scene linked to a minister in the Narendra Modi-led Union government.

On the night of August 31, six men gathered in a house in the Thakurganj area of Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh to party. They got drunk and played cards till late. At around 2 am, they ate dinner, following which two of those present went home to sleep. The remaining four continued to drink and gamble till 4 am. Things turned sour when one of them, Vinay Srivastava, accused the other three of ganging up against him. He had lost Rs 12,000 in bets and was irked that the other three were ending the game to prevent him from recovering his losses. The disagreement soon turned physical. Blows were exchanged. Vinay’s shirt was completely torn. Then, one of the other three men grabbed a revolver that was kept under a pillow on the bed in one of the rooms and shot Vinay in the head. He died on the spot. Police arrested the three men, Ajay Rawat (32), Ankit Verma (27) and Shamim (21) and claimed the three had confessed to the crime.

This is what joint commissioner of police (HQ and crime) Akash Kulhary found in the preliminary investigation.

The licensed revolver used in the crime belonged to Vikas Kishore aka Ashu, the son of BJP MP from Mohanlalganj and Union minister of state for housing and urban affairs, Kaushal Kishore. The incident happened in the minister's house. Kishore said his son was in Delhi at the time of the crime. On September 2, however, the Lucknow police lodged an FIR against Vikas under Section 30 of the Arms Act and started the process to cancel the weapon’s license.

Vikas, 28, is the vice-president of the BJP’s Dalit morcha in UP’s Awadh region. His father Kaushal Kishore is the BJP’s state president of the SC/ST wing. The victim, Vinay, was Vikas’s close associate.

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The murder may have been solved but the scandal has left another stain on Kishore's image. His fascinating political journey – from being a grounded Dalit Communist leader to ending up as a minister in the saffron camp – marking the shifts in caste mobilisation in the state, is a story of its own. However, in the last three-four years, Kishore’s public image as a leader with a clean record has been overshadowed by the controversies surrounding three of his four sons.

The incidents range from plain embarrassment caused by one son for staging a murder attempt on himself to the tragedy of losing another to alcohol abuse, and now this murder case in Lucknow.

In October 2020, Kishore’s son Aakash Kishore died due to liver cirrhosis after years of alcohol abuse. Shattered by the loss, Kishore vowed to end alcoholism and rolled out a social campaign against alcohol and other substance abuse – Nashamukti Samaj Andolan or Campaign for a Drug Free Society. Since then, he has organised numerous awareness meetings, half-marathons, social media live events and pledge ceremonies against use of drugs. Kishore even asks people in his Lok Sabha constituency Mohanlalganj, which circles Lucknow, to take a pledge against drugs and alcohol on festivals such as Holi. He appeals to people to not get their daughters married to men who drink alcohol or use drugs.

“To ensure that no other person loses his son to nasha, I will work till my last breath to save children and the youth from nasha and make India nashamukt,” the minister said recently. On International Youth Day, this August, chief minister Yogi Adityanath launched a state-wide campaign against drugs – 'Nasha Mukt Pradesh, Shashakt Pradesh Abhiyan’. At the event, Adityanath referred to Kishore’s son Aakash as an example to warn the youth against the ills of drug abuse.

While Kishore is using his son Aakash’s tragic demise to promote anti-alcoholism, his second son Ayush has brought him all the negative headlines due to controversies in his personal life.

In March 2021, Ayush was shot by someone in Lucknow. This raised questions on the law and order situation in the city.

However, Kishore was left embarrassed after police revealed a few hours later that Ayush had staged an attack on himself. Ayush got himself shot by his brother-in-law Adarsh to frame someone else in the case, police said, booking the two in an FIR. Adarsh was later arrested. Police said they cracked the case after they found Adarsh’s activity to be suspicious and recovered a pistol used in the firing from the house where the MP’s son was staying. Two shots were fired. The first one hit a wall. The second touched Ayush and went past him. But the drama didn’t end there. Ayush had entered into an inter-caste love marriage with a woman his family did not approve of. He had been living separately from his father. Kishore had to come out in public and explain why the family disapproved of her, in unnecessary drama from his point of view.

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A few days after the staged shooting, Kishore’s estranged daughter-in-law Ankita Singh reached outside the MP’s residence and slit her wrists. She had to be hospitalised. In a video before attempting suicide, she accused the MP, his wife Jai Devi (a BJP MLA) and her husband Ayush of mistreating her and intimidating her. Kishore was again drawn to public scrutiny as the drama played out on television channels. “She is doing all this to tarnish our image,” Kishore said then, refusing to acknowledge Ankita as his daughter-in-law.

Kishore was born in rural Lucknow in a Dalit family, one not in public life, in 1960. His father went around villages selling vegetables on a cycle. After being active in Left politics during his student days, Kishore took the plunge into electoral politics at the age of 25. In 1985, he contested his first assembly election from Malihabad constituency as a candidate of the Communist Party of India. Malihabad is a town known world over for its variety of delicious mangoes. But for Kishore, his political debut was not so sweet. He lost. The same result followed when he contested again in 1993 and 1996. But his position improved vastly. He stood second to the Samajwadi Party’s candidate Gauri Shankar on both occasions, losing by less than 7,000 votes.

In 2002, when the CPI got into an alliance with the SP, Kishore parted ways with the party as his seat went to Mulayam Singh’s party, and contested as an independent. He finally cracked the code and defeated Gauri Shankar by more than 25,000 votes. For his support to the Mulayam Singh government, he was rewarded with a ministerial berth and served as minister of state for labour. Kishore then went on to form his own party – Rashtrawadi Communist Party – and contested two assembly elections on its symbol in 2007 and 2012. However, he lost by thin margins on both occasions. Earlier in 2004, he even contested the Lok Sabha election as an RCP candidate but lost even though he secured a decent tally of 25,000 votes on his own popularity.

“Successive defeats had come as a huge setback. And after the 2012 defeat, he had to struggle a lot. But he didn’t give up. There were times when only three to four people would turn up at a meeting but he would still conduct it,” said a former close aide of the minister's.

This is when Kishore decided he needed the support of a mainstream party. In 2014, months before the Lok Sabha election, he joined the BJP. The decision turned out to be fruitful. Riding on the popularity of Narendra Modi and the BJP's resources, Kishore was elected the MP from Mohanlalganj. Two years later, he was appointed the president of the BJP’s UP Dalit wing.

As his clout grew, in 2017, he ensured his wife Jai Devi got a ticket from Malihabad. She was elected as a BJP MLA. In 2018, as the BJP prepared to expand its vote bank anticipating a joint opposition in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, Kishore oversaw meetings where the party reached out to various Dalit castes individually and spoke to them about the welfare schemes of the government benefitting them. Kaushal was elected an MP for a second time in 2019. Jai Devi too won her seat again in the 2022 assembly elections, though with a reduced margin of 7,745 votes. Her brother Amrish Kumar was also elected as a BJP MLA from Mohanlalganj assembly seat.

In July 2021, in a message to the Pasi community in UP, Kishore was inducted into the Union council of ministers ahead of the 2022 state assembly elections. Kaushal is largely seen as the Pasi face of the BJP today. The Pasis are the second largest Dalit community in UP after Jatavs and are numerically concentrated in districts in Awadh and Purvanchal. Since they don’t have a single leader or party loyalty, their votes are always up for grabs. There are several constituencies in central UP where a candidate cannot win without the support of the community.

In Adityanath's second term, Kishore has played a role in the BJP’s attempts to appropriate B.R. Ambedkar's legacy.

In 2022, under the banner of Parakh Mahasangh, an outfit he started for oppressed and deprived sections, he held a seminar on ‘The Role of BJP and RSS in taking forward Ambedkar’s mission’. This year too, he conducted a similar event on Ambedkar Jayanti in Lucknow. The theme was ‘BJP government and RSS are fulfilling Dr. Ambedkar’s mission of a society free of caste and oppression’. The publicity material distributed for the event had Ambedkar on one flank, and Sangh ideologues Keshav Baliram Hedgewar and Syama Prasad Mukherjee on the other.

Kishore’s former aide said that him “going astray ideologically” was a reason why many of his old-time, core supporters, including himself, were leaving him and joining the SP. In 2021, one of Kaushal’s daughters-in-law lost her election for the zila panchayat. HIs supporters say that despite controversies surrounding his family, Kishore is still a popular leader, considered accessible by all sections.

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