Samajwadi Party MP from Ghazipur Afzal Ansari got a big relief from Allahabad High Court on Monday when a single bench of the court cancelled the punishment given under the Gangster Act in the BJP MLA Krishnanand Rai murder case.

The high court accepted the appeal of Afzal Ansari and cancelled the four-year sentence awarded to him by a special court in the case.

After this verdict pronounced by the single bench of Justice Sanjay Kumar Singh, Afzal’s membership of Parliament will remain intact.

Afzal Ansari was sentenced to four-year imprisonment by the MP MLA Court of Ghazipur in the case registered after the murder of Krishnanand. The accused had filed an appeal against the verdict in the high court and appealed for the revocation of the sentence while the state government and Krishnanand Rai’s son filed an appeal in the high court to increase the sentence.

Earlier, the appeal was rejected by the high court prompting Afzal to approach the Supreme Court.

Suspending the sentence, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the high court for rehearing. After the hearing held on the apex court orders, the court had reserved the decision on July 4.

Arguing on behalf of Afzal, senior advocates, Gopal Swaroop Chaturvedi, Dayashankar Mishra, and Upendra Upadhyay, said the action under the Gangster’s Act started in the Krishnanand Rai murder case is illegal because Afzal Ansari was acquitted.

However, State Government’s Additional Advocate General PC Srivastava said lesser punishment cannot be given merely on the basis of political influence and increasing age. Doing this will increase the dominance of criminals in politics and break the morale of common people.

Afzal Ansari was elected MP from the Ghazipur Lok Sabha constituency for the second consecutive time. He contested the 2024 Lok Sabha elections as a Samajwadi Party (SP) candidate while in 2019 he won the seat on a Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) ticket defeating BJP’s Paras Nath Rai by a margin of 1,24,861 votes.