Abdul Jalil Mastan

Abdul Jalil Mastan, often styled Haji Abdul Jalil Mastan, was a Seemanchal Congress leader whose four-decade career tied Amour assembly politics to Bihar's statewide experiment with prohibition. He died on 12 September 2026 at AIIMS in New Delhi after a prolonged illness. He was 68. Chief Minister Samrat Choudhary called him an able political leader and social worker and said his last rites would be performed with full state honours. The body was brought back to his native Sirsi in Purnea district, where thousands attended the namaz-e-janaza before burial with a guard of honour.

Born into a landed family in Sirsi in Baisi block of Purnea, Mastan grew up among village life, farming and the everyday problems of flood-prone Kosi-Seemanchal. Election affidavits list his father as Amir Udin (Amirudin) and describe Mastan as an agriculturist and social worker. Candidate records and later memorial notices give his date of birth as 1 January 1958. In a 2025 interview with Main Media he recalled finishing college shortly before the 1985 assembly election and entering politics under pressure from local people who wanted a voice for Amour.

His first contest in 1985 was as an Independent. In a five-way fight he won Amour with only about 17.55 percent of the vote, enough in a splintered field to reach the Bihar Legislative Assembly. Then Chief Minister Jagannath Mishra invited him closer; Mastan soon joined the Indian National Congress and never left it. As a Congress candidate he won Amour again in 1990 with a much larger share of the vote. A narrow 1995 defeat by a few hundred votes and a later by-election loss interrupted the rise, but he returned in 2000 and then won both of Bihar's unusual 2005 assembly elections from the same seat.

Beyond the Vidhan Sabha he tried for Parliament. In the 2004 Lok Sabha election, after Congress and the RJD assigned Kishanganj elsewhere in the alliance, he contested Kishanganj for the Samajwadi Party, finished third with roughly 77,000 votes, and returned to state politics. The 2010 election brought another setback when BJP candidate Saba Zafar defeated him. Five years later the Mahagathbandhan of JD(U), RJD and Congress reshaped Bihar. Mastan won Amour in 2015 with more than 100,000 votes, about 60 percent, and on 20 November 2015 took oath as minister for Registration, Excise and Prohibition in Nitish Kumar's cabinet, with Tejashwi Yadav as Deputy Chief Minister.

That portfolio put him at the centre of Nitish Kumar's promise to women voters. In December 2015 he said the coming ban would cover all kinds of liquor. From April 2016 Bihar imposed a complete prohibition on sale and consumption that still stands. Enforcement, seizures and the politics of a dry state made Mastan a frequent voice in Hindi and English news. He remained close to Amour's flood-hit villages even while holding three departments, a local style that supporters later called zameeni neta politics.

Cabinet service ended on 16 July 2017 when the JD(U)-RJD-Congress arrangement broke. Mastan stayed with Congress through the 2020 defeat in Amour, where AIMIM state president Akhtarul Iman took the seat, and through a third-place finish in 2025. Leaders across parties, including RJD's Lalu Prasad and Tejashwi Yadav, Assembly Speaker Prem Kumar, and AIMIM's Akhtarul Iman, described him after his death as a leader of the masses with little personal bitterness. For Seemanchal Congress, his name remains bound to Amour's long electoral memory and to the first years of Bihar's liquor ban.