Sabir Ali – the Right Candidate for RS?
Patna: March 14, 2008
 Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) leader Ram Vilas Paswan, by nominating Sabir Ali as the party's Rajya Sabha candidate, once again established that a long, controversial, even a checkered criminal history not only not hurts the party but in fact helps boost a party's relevance in the contemporary Indian political scenario.
Sabir Ali who failed to file his nomination paper on Friday due to some technicality and is expected to complete the formality on Saturday was one of the key accused in the high-profile murder of the owner of T-Series Gulshan Kumar over a decade ago, reports said.
 Kumar, who ran his audio cassette empire under the name of T-Series, was gunned down outside a Juhu temple in Mumbai on August 12, 1997. Sabir Ali was one of the 19 key accused who spent months in Bombay Jail before being released in the lack of sufficient evidence.
Ali, who is said to be a close associate of the incarcerated Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader Mohammed Shahabuddin and the Mumbai underworld, has also been connected with the infamous Mumbai blasts that left many people dead though he had been careful enough to erase his tracks to avoid any conviction, sources said.
Interestingly, the RJD leaders, during a recent meeting of the UPA constituents of which both the RJD and the LJP are key players, insisted on nominating any LJP candidate as long as it was not Ranjan Yadav, the former friend of RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav.
According to the sources, the LJP national secretary Ranjan Yadav had all but signed the dotted line to secure the party nomination for the Rajya Sabha seat until the RJD chief and Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav pulled some strings within the UPA to ensure Ranjan Yadav was eliminated from the party's short list and Ali was in.
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