A former Indian state minister and his wife were sentenced yesterday to life imprisonment for conspiring to murder a Hindi poet who was carrying his baby.

The dramatic verdict was the conclusion of a long-running case that transfixed even hardened observers of politics in Uttar Pradesh, one of the most lawless states in India.

Madhumita Shukla, who was well known for her public poetry recitals, was found shot dead in her apartment in the state capital of Lucknow on May 9, 2003. She was seven months pregnant. Her family alleged that she had been murdered at the behest of Amarmani Tripathi, then a state minister, and his wife, Madhumani, because of the embarrassment caused by the affair and the pregnancy. DNA tests confirmed Tripathi as the father of the unborn baby.

The couple, along with two male accomplices, were found guilty of conspiracy to murder by a special court in Dehradun in the neighbouring state of Uttarakhand. The court fined all four 50,000 rupees (£620) each. Prakash Chander Pandey, the alleged gunman, was cleared because of insufficient evidence.

The Madhumita murder is not so unusual in a province where public office and crime are regular bedfellows, but it has attracted added attention because it occurred in the constituency of Atal Behari Vajpayee, then Prime Minister.

Tripathi denied that his family had anything to do with the death of the poet but was soon dismissed by Mayawati, then chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, who came under intense political pressure to save her party from the embarrassment of the affair.

Tripathi was arrested four months after the murder only when federal investigators took over the investigation. Released on bail after seven months, he continued to exert pressure on relatives of his late mistress to retract evidence against him. “The threats never stopped,” Nidhi Shukla, the poet’s sister, said.

The case highlighted the helplessness of ordinary people in pursuit of justice against authority figures in India, particularly in the anarchic states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

The Shukla family were pushing for the death penalty but Justice V. B. Roy concluded that it was only warranted in “the rarest of rare crimes”. That it was the Tripathis’ first conviction and that they had children convinced him to hand down life sentences. The couple plan to appeal.

This month Anand Mohan became the first former MP to receive the death sentence after being found guilty of inciting a lynch mob to murder a district magistrate in eastern Bihar in 1994.

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