Mulayam Singh Yadav, the leader of the Samajwadi Party (SP) and three-time chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, passed away on Monday at a hospital in Gurugram following a protracted illness.
Akhilesh Yadav, the SP national president and Mulayam’s son, made the announcement via the party’s official Twitter account. The tweet in Hindi stated, “My loving father and everyone’s ‘netaji’ is no more – Shri Akhilesh Yadav.”
The 82-year-old former defence minister was hospitalised since August and moved to the Medanta Hospital’s intensive care unit in Gurugram on October 2.
The party has announced that Mulayam will be cremated on Tuesday at around 3 p.m. in Saifai, his hometown in the Etawah district.
Numerous world leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Droupadi Murmu, expressed their condolences for his demise.
Yadav’s accomplishments, according to Murmu, were outstanding considering his upbringing.
“The elderly leader “Dharti Putra” Mulayam ji had ties to the land. People from all sides respected him. My sincere sympathies to his family and friends.” Murmu posted tweets in Hindi.
The prime minister claimed that Yadav faithfully served the public and dedicated his life to popularising the beliefs of Ram Manohar Lohia and Jayaprakash Narayan.
Both the Congress and the BJP expressed their condolences on Yadav’s departure and claimed it was an irreparable loss to Indian politics.
Yogi Adityanath, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, declared a three-day period of national mourning and stated Yadav’s final rites would be performed with all due state honours.
Yadav, who was born on November 22, 1939, into a farming family in Saifai, close to Etawah, Uttar Pradesh, gave rise to the most powerful political dynasty in the region.
Yadav held three different positions of chief minister between 1989 and 2007: 1989–91, 1993–95, and 1996–98.
The leader of the SP was elected as an MLA ten times and as an MP seven times, largely in Mainpuri and Azamgarh.
Although Yadav had the status of a national leader for many years, Uttar Pradesh remained essentially the arena in which he practised politics, starting as a young man who was influenced by socialist leader Lohia.
For party members, the patriarch remained Netaji, the leader, even when he stepped down as SP president in 2017 and handed the reins to his son Akhilesh Yadav. And his presence on the scene served as the glue that, at least in part, kept the Yadav family together.
Yadav, a socialist, was open to all political ramifications. He had ties to several parties, including Charan Singh’s Bharatiya Kranti Dal, Lohia’s Sanyukt Socialist Party, the Bharatiya Lok Dal, and the Samajwadi Janata Party. In 1992, he started his own SP.
To build or save the governments he led in Uttar Pradesh, Yadav made deals with the Bahujan Samaj Party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, and the Congress wherever necessary.
In Parliament in 2019, Netaji surprised everyone by praising Modi and expressing the hope that he would remain in that position following the next election. This was at a time when his party viewed Modi’s BJP as its primary challenger in UP. The comment perplexed analysts.
In 2014 at a rally, he made another remark that provoked uproar when he argued against the death penalty for rapists and said that boys make mistakes. And then there was his support for a confederation of Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India.
After earning a degree in political science, Yadav participated in student union agitations and temporarily taught at an intercollegiate institution. He initially was elected to the legislature in 1967.
Indira Gandhi proclaimed an emergency during Yadav’s second term as an MLA from the same constituency, and Yadav was detained alongside other opposition leaders.
After the 1975–1977 Emergency, Yadav returned to the fray and was elected state president of the Lok Dal. He led one of the state unit’s factions when the party split.
Before becoming chief minister in 1989 with the BJP providing outside support to his Janata Dal government, Yadav served as opposition leader in the UP Legislative Council and subsequently the state parliament.
The Congress maintained his government for a few months after the saffron party withdrew its backing in 1990 due to the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi controversy.
Yadav once more led a government in UP in November 1993, this time with assistance from the BSP. When the ally pulled the rug up, it fell.
The SP leader then transitioned to the national level by winning Mainpuri’s Lok Sabha election in 1996.
Yadav momentarily seemed to be in the running for the job of prime minister as opposition parties attempted to put together a non-BJP alternative to the Congress.
Nevertheless, he was appointed defence minister in the H D Deve Gowda-led United Front government, and it was during his tenure that the Russian Sukhoi fighter jet contract was completed. Years later, he would take part in the short-lived Janata Parivar coalition that sought to work together to win the 2015 Bihar Assembly elections.
After a short-lived BSP-BJP coalition government fell in 2003, Yadav was elected as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh for the third time.
The SP was once more in a position to constitute the UP government in 2012. However, the elder Yadav resigned so that his 38-year-old son Akhilesh could become the state’s youngest chief executive.
Akhilesh Yadav, however, staged a sort of coup in 2017 as a result of disputes within the family and party. Akhilesh, the son from his first marriage to Malti Devi, was at odds with the old guard, which included uncle Shivpal Singh Yadav. He later married Sadhna Gupta.
The elderly patriarch’s involvement in the activities of the party he had formed waned in the later years of his life.