Vijay Kumar Shukla

Vijay Kumar Shukla, also known as Munna Shukla, is a former Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) from Bihar, India. He has been elected on three occasions to the Bihar Legislative Assembly. He is currently serving a jail term for murder.[1]

Family and education

He is the brother of Chhotan Shukla, a notorious gang member who died in 1994, and Bhutkun Shukla, who killed a man at Chhotan's brother's funeral and is now also dead.[2] He had his primary education in his village. His wife, Annu Shukla, is a MLA for his former seat.[3]

Political career

Shukla was first elected a MLA from the Lalganj constituency in the February 2005 Bihar elections as a Lok Janshakti Party candidate. In the October elections of that year he won again after switching to be a Janata Dal (United) candidate.[4] Earlier, his elder brother, Bhutkun, had unsuccessfully contested the seat.

Shukla later stood as an independent candidate for the Lok Sabha constituency of Vaishali. There he lost to the national vice-president of the Rashtriya Janata Dal, Raghuvansh Prasad Singh. He was debarred from election as he was convicted in the Brij Behari Prasad murder case along with Surajbhan Singh.[1]

Crime

The criminal careers of Shukla and of Anand Mohan Singh, both of which were intertwined with politics, ran in parallel for many years and were of equal note. Tehelka said in 2007 that

it was his muscleman image that made Mohan’s name synonymous with terror in Bihar’s poverty-ridden Saharsa-Supaul belt for the past 20 years. He and Munna Shukla faced several criminal cases, many of them for murder, in various courts across Bihar. While Shukla still remains a dreaded figure around Muzaffarpur and Vaishali districts in north Bihar, Mohan is notorious in the Saharsa-Supaul belt as a criminal and sometimes as a kind of folk hero.[5]

The two overlapped completely in 1994 at the time of the lynching of a Dalit district magistrate near to Muzaffarpur during the funeral cortege of Chhotan Shukla. In 2007 they were sentenced to death for their involvement in the murder but Shukla's sentence was later overturned on appeal, when it was determined that he was present but uninvolved, and Singh's sentence was reduced to life imprisonment.[5][6]

While in jail for that offence in 2012, Shukla was studied for and was awarded a PhD by Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar Bihar University.[7]

References

  1. 1 2 Jha, Giridhar (28 October 2012). "Lawless in Bihar: Ex-JD(U) MLA makes extortion calls in the name of Nitish's rally while still in jail". India Today. Retrieved 2015-06-07.
  2. ↑ Gupta, Smita (15 October 2007). "Pinned Lynch". Outlook. PTI. Retrieved 2015-06-07.
  3. ↑ "Bihar - Lalganj". Bihar Assembly Elections Nov 2010 results. Election Commission of India. Retrieved 2015-06-07.
  4. ↑ "51 - Lalganj Assembly Constituency". Partywise Comparison Since 1977. Election Commission of India. Archived from the original on 2012-04-15.
  5. 1 2 St Das, Anand (20 October 2007). "Law's Arm: 13 Years Long". Tehelka. Retrieved 2015-06-07.
  6. ↑ "Supreme Court upholds life term for ex-MP in DM murder case". The Hindu. 11 July 2012. Retrieved 2015-06-07.
  7. ↑ Ramashankar (8 July 2012). "Masters in crime bask in doctoral glory from four walls of prison". The Telegraph. Retrieved 2015-06-10.


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