The Allahabad High Court stayed the two-year jail sentence of former MLA Abbas Ansari, son of the late mafia don Mukhtar Ansari, here on Wednesday.
However, in a major relief, Abbas Ansari’s assembly membership will now be reinstated, and there will be no by-election in the Mau assembly seat.
The judgment was delivered by a single-judge bench of Justice Sameer Jain.
The High Court accepted Abbas Ansari’s petition and set aside the two-year sentence awarded by the MP/MLA Special Court in Mau.
The High Court had reserved its verdict on July 30 after hearing arguments from both sides and pronounced the judgment today.
In connection with an inflammatory speech delivered during the 2022 assembly elections, the MP/MLA Court in Mau had sentenced Abbas Ansari to two years of imprisonment and imposed a fine of ₹3,000 on May 31. On this basis, he was disqualified from the Uttar Pradesh Assembly on June 1, 2025.
Earlier, the District Judge’s Court in Mau had rejected Abbas Ansari’s appeal on July 5, after which he filed a petition in the High Court challenging that order.
Advocate Upendra Upadhyay argued on behalf of Abbas Ansari, while Ajay Kumar Mishra and OMC Chaturvedi represented the Uttar Pradesh government and opposed the stay on the MP/MLA Special Court’s order.