SENIOR SAMAJWADI Party (SP) leader and former Uttar Pradesh minister Mohammad Azam Khan walked out of Sitapur district jail on Tuesday afternoon after spending nearly two years in custody — his second stint there.
Khan, seen as one of the SP’s most prominent Muslim leaders, has played a central role in the party for years. His legal troubles started with a hate speech case filed before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the first of many that followed. Since then, cases against him piled up steadily. His wife, Tanzeen Fatima, and son, Abdullah Azam Khan, have also faced several charges.
On Tuesday, Khan was released from jail after securing bail in all 79 criminal cases filed against him. A ten-time MLA from Rampur Sadar, Khan was granted bail by different courts in Rampur as well as from higher courts, including the Allahabad High Court and the Supreme Court, over various stages of his incarceration.
“We released him only after receiving (release) order in all the cases,” said Sitapur district jail superintendent Suresh Singh.
The last case in which he was granted bail was registered in 2020 at the Civil Lines police station in Rampur. The case involved allegations of cheating along with related offences, and the court’s order cleared the final hurdle for his release.
The Uttar Pradesh Police records show that Azam Khan faces a total of 111 cases, with only five registered outside Rampur — one each in Lucknow and Firozabad and three in Moradabad. The rest are mostly concentrated in Rampur, particularly at Azeem Nagar and Civil Lines police stations.
The records further show that over 81 of these cases were filed after the BJP came to power in Uttar Pradesh in 2017. Of these, around 70 cases were registered in 2019 alone, followed by six more in 2020, reflecting a significant surge during this period. These cases cover a wide range of charges, including land grabbing, cheating, vandalism, trespass, hate speech and criminal intimidation. Several cases specifically relate to allegations that Khan and his associates attempted to grab land in Rampur’s Dongarpur area. Authorities claimed that houses built on this land were demolished on grounds of encroachment, and the property was later reportedly used for the expansion of the Mohammad Ali Jauhar University, of which Khan serves as founder and chancellor.
In 2022, the Rampur police filed a case against Khan and others after allegedly recovering government road-cleaning machines buried inside the Mohammad Ali Jauhar University campus. The machines, purchased by Rampur Nagar Palika, were reportedly dismantled and buried on the university campus. Police had claimed that they learned about this during the questioning of an accused in another case and later recovered the machines from the campus
In addition to these, cases were also filed against him and his aides for allegedly threatening witnesses involved in proceedings against him.
According to Uttar Pradesh Police records, Khan has been convicted in six cases — five in Rampur and one in Moradabad. He has filed appeals against all these convictions and has also secured bail in each of them. Except for one case dating back to 2008, the rest were filed in 2019. The charges in these cases range from house trespass and vandalism to hate speech and obstructing traffic.
In addition, Khan has been acquitted in six other cases. However, the state government has challenged a few of these acquittals in higher courts, and the appeals remain pending.
Azam Khan’s first spell in jail began in February, 2020, when he, along with his wife and son, surrendered before a Rampur court in a case related to the alleged forgery of his son Abdullah Azam’s birth certificate. His wife was granted bail and released soon after and also his son, but Khan continued to remain behind bars. He was released in May 2022, when the Supreme Court granted him interim bail.
During his imprisonment, Khan contested the 2022 Assembly elections from Rampur while still lodged in jail and won by a comfortable margin. He entered the fray for the Assembly seat after vacating the Rampur Lok Sabha constituency, which he had won in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
However, a few months later after winning the seat, Khan lost his Assembly membership in October, 2022, after a Rampur court convicted him in a hate speech case filed ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, sentencing him to three years in prison.
Subsequently, his son, Abdullah Azam Khan, was also disqualified as an MLA, who had won the Assembly seat from Suar in Rampur in 2022 election. A Moradabad court sentenced him to two years in prison alongside his father in a case filed in 2008. The case pertained to a protest staged after their cavalcade was stopped by the police for security checks, following an attack on a CRPF camp in Rampur on December 31, 2007.
Nearly a year after his release, Khan was again sent to jail in October 2023, along with his wife and son Abdullah, after being convicted in the case concerning Abdullah’s birth certificate. The court sentenced all three to seven years in prison, following which they were taken into custody.
While Tanzeen Fatima and Abdullah were later granted bail and released, Khan remained behind bars due to several other pending criminal cases against him.