PATNA : A 62-year-old life convict in Bihar married a 46-year-old Delhi-based woman at a temple near Patna in the wee hours of Wednesday to seek a Lok Sabha ticket for his newly-wed wife from a political party.
Ashok Mahto, a key conspirator of infamous Nawada jailbreak of 2002 on which Neeraj Pandey made a crime thriller web series ‘Khakee D Bihar Chapter’ based on the novel by a Bihar cadre IPS officer Amit Lodha, married Kumari Anita at the famous Jagdamba temple near Bakhtiyarpur in Patna in ‘kharmas’ (inauspicious month).
After that, the couple visited RJD chief Lalu Prasad and his former chief minister wife Rabri Devi’s residence and sought their blessings. Anita will likely be pitted against JD(U), former president and party MP from Munger Rajiv Ranjan Singh, alias Lalan Singh. A law graduate from Delhi University, she worked with a private company.
RJD spokesperson Chitranjan Gagan said that she was associated with RJD when she was working in New Delhi. “Our party will give preference to women in the ticket distribution by considering the winnability factor. She (Anita) may get advantage of it,” he added.
Mahto was released from jail on December 10, 2023, after languishing for 17 years in 2001. He had met Lalu after coming out of the prison.
Sources close to Mahto said though Mahto had expressed his ambition to contest the election, he could not do so as he was a convict serving a sentence.
As he had lost his first wife while in jail, Mahto decided to get married for the second time and thus chose Anita.
A native of Konanpur village in Nawada district, Mahto gained notoriety in 1990 when he engaged in a caste war with Akhilesh Singh of Nawada. Dozens of people from both sides were killed in the decade-old gang war. Mahto’s archrival Akhilesh’s wife, Aruna Devi, is a JD(U) MLA from Warisaliganj in Nawada district.
His name also figured in the killing of former Congress MP Rajo Singh in 2005.