Vijay Kumar Shukla

Vijay Kumar Shukla, also known as Kumar Munna or 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 served a jail term for murder. He was left out of jail on bail later.[1]

Family and education

He is the brother of Chhotan Shukla, a notorious gang member who was assassinated in 1994, allegedly by the henchmen of Brij Bihari Prasad, a minister belonging to OBC Bania caste, who was a strongman from Lalu Prasad Yadav's Rashtriya Janata Dal. His another brother Bhutkun Shukla who was responsible for killing G.Krishnaiah, the District Magistrate of Gopalganj during Chhotan's funeral procession and is now also dead.[2] His wife, Annu Shukla, is an MLA from 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]

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. 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 7 June 2015.
  2. Gupta, Smita (15 October 2007). "Pinned Lynch". Outlook. PTI. Retrieved 7 June 2015.
  3. "Bihar - Lalganj". Bihar Assembly Elections Nov 2010 results. Election Commission of India. Retrieved 7 June 2015.
  4. "51 - Lalganj Assembly Constituency". Partywise Comparison Since 1977. Election Commission of India. Archived from the original on 15 April 2012.
  5. St Das, Anand (20 October 2007). "Law's Arm: 13 Years Long". Tehelka. Archived from the original on 10 June 2015. Retrieved 7 June 2015.
  6. "Supreme Court upholds life term for ex-MP in DM murder case". The Hindu. 11 July 2012. Retrieved 7 June 2015.
  7. Ramashankar (8 July 2012). "Masters in crime bask in doctoral glory from four walls of prison". The Telegraph. Retrieved 10 June 2015.


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