Tiwari 's rivalry with Virendra Pratap Shahi, another mafia-turned politian was a epic story

Tiwari contested assembly elections from Chillupar in 1985 and became an MLA for the first time. He had contested this election while being lodged in jail. Subsequently, he won five consecutive elections from this seat and remained an MLA. During the phase of unstable governments in UP, which began in 1997, he also became a minister in the cabinets of Kalyan Singh, Ramprakash Gupta, Rajnath Singh, Mayawati and Mulayam Singh. He was also handed a cabinet berth in the one-day Jagdambika Pal government.

In the 1980s, Gorakhpur witnessed a period of caste war between the two power centres – Tiwari’s ‘Hata’ and Shahi’s ‘Shakti Sadan’. In this gang war, more than 50 people – including Janata Party MLA Ravindra Singh and Gorakhpur Student Union vice president Rang Narayan Pandey – were killed. During this period, Gorakhpur earned the sobriquet ‘Chicago of the East’ and ‘Slice of Sicily’.

The seeds of this caste war were sown right when the Gorakhpur University was founded. It not only engulfed student politics but later extended to the politics of the entire Purvanchal region. After the establishment of the university, a rivalry broke out between Surati Narayan Mani Tripathi (the first district magistrate of Gorakhpur and later the treasurer of the university) and Mahant Digvijay Nath of the Gorakhnath temple for control over it. The appointment of teachers and employees in the university was done on the basis of caste. Student leaders were made pawns in this battle for supremacy. Harishankar Tiwari, who was a student here, was made a member of the University Court in 1965 by the Brahmin lobby. In response, Balwant Singh and Ravindra Singh were projected as the face of the Thakur lobby.

This battle for caste supremacy soon turned into a bloody struggle with a spate of murders.

The bloody trail of violence and counter-violence between the two groups lasted for almost a decade. First, in 1978, student leader Balwant Singh, who was close to Ravindra Singh, was murdered in Golghar. Before Singh, a person named Mannu had been killed.

When Singh was killed, Virendra Pratap Shahi was in Basti kickstarting his political career. He contested assembly elections from Basti in 1974 and received only 5,740 votes. He was named in a murder there. Soon, he entered an enmity with Rana Krishna Kinkar Singh after Singh lost one eye to Shahi’s bullet. It is claimed that after Balwant Singh’s murder, Ravindra Singh called Shahi from Basti to Gorakhpur after securing his bail as he was in jail then.

Shortly after Shahi arrived in Gorakhpur, one of his supporters, Bechai Pandey, was murdered on August 28, 1978. In retaliation, three people including Rang Narayan Pandey, vice-president of the Gorakhpur University Students’ Union, were killed in Danwarpar the same evening.

A year later, Amol Shukla was murdered. Soon after, Ravindra Singh, the MLA of the Janata Party and President of Gorakhpur University and Lucknow University Students’ Union, was shot at Gorakhpur railway station on August 27, 1979. He was severely injured in the attack and died three days later. One more person was also killed in the firing at the railway station.

With this began a spate of murders as both factions entered a running feud over government contracts for taxi stands, district hospitals, medical colleges and railways. Virendra Pratap Shahi was attacked in the district hospital but survived. Later, there were three more attacks on him. The vengeful murders spread over to Lucknow from Gorakhpur and Basti Mandal. Both the groups would file FIRs against each other citing the incidents as the rationale.

In police records, Tiwari and Shahi had tons of serious charges against them but they were portrayed otherwise in the media. In newspapers, Pandit Harishankar Tiwari was referred to as an ’eminent leader’ and Virendra Pratap Shahi as ‘The Lion of Purvanchal’. The press releases for both of them were measured and printed in the same size. If this equation faltered, local journalists and editors would bear the brunt. Such stories of their notoriety are still popular in the region today....

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