Mulayam Singh Yadav

Mulayam Singh Yadav (born November 22, 1939, Saifai, Etawah district, Uttar Pradesh state, India—died October 10, 2022, Gurugram, Haryana) was an Indian politician and government official who founded and was the longtime leader of the Samajwadi (Socialist) Party (SP) of India. He served three times as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh state (1989–91, 1993–95, and 2003–07).

Early life

Yadav was raised in a farming family near Etawah, in what is now west-central Uttar Pradesh, one of six children. He initially wanted to become a wrestler, but he went to college and completed a master’s degree in political science from Agra University. He became involved in politics at the age of 15, when he encountered the writing of the Indian socialist Ram Manohar Lohia. Lohia’s convictions on the equality of peoples and other social justice issues strongly influenced Yadav’s own ideas about standing up for the rights of lower-caste Hindus and the minority Muslim population; his actions based on those principles marked his subsequent political career.

Political career

Yadav’s first electoral victory came in 1967, when he won a seat in the Uttar Pradesh legislative assembly, the lower house of the state legislature. Yadav contested on a ticket from the short-lived Samyukta Socialist Party, which then merged with the Janata Party, an amalgam of political factions. He was reelected in 1974, but his term was interrupted when he was one of the opposition politicians arrested in 1975 and held for 19 months during the national state of emergency imposed by Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. After his release in 1977, he contested and won back his seat in the assembly, serving as Uttar Pradesh’s minister for animal husbandry.

In 1980 Yadav lost the assembly election and joined the Lok Dal (“People’s Party”), becoming president of the party’s Uttar Pradesh unit. When the party split in 1982 he headed the state’s Lok Dal-B faction and was elected to the Uttar Pradesh legislative council, the upper house of the state legislature. A period of political turbulence followed in India in which opposition party outlines took on an amorphous quality with multiple splits and mergers. In 1985 Yadav was reelected to the Uttar Pradesh assembly, becoming leader of the opposition. In 1987 he formed a coalition called Krantikari Morcha (“Revolutionary Faction”), with the left-wing parties and the Janata Party as allies.

Chief minister of Uttar Pradesh

In 1989, just months before assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, Yadav joined the Janata Dal (also translated as “People’s Party”; JD), a merger of smaller parties and breakaway factions led by V.P. Singh. The JD emerged as the single largest party in the state, unseating the Indian National Congress with the outside support of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—as of 2024 the Congress had never returned to power in Uttar Pradesh since. Yadav was sworn in as chief minister for the first of his three terms. The BJP withdrew its backing in 1990, however, following a confrontation at the Babri Masjid (“Mosque of Bābur”) in Ayodhya between police and right-wing Hindus occupying the building. Yadav’s administration did last into 1991 with help from the Congress Party until that support also was withdrawn and the BJP formed a government.

Samajwadi Party

Yadav found new political life after the Babri Masjid, which was believed to have been built on the site of the birthplace of the deity Rama, was destroyed by Hindu right-wing activists in December 1992 and bloody rioting ensued. He and his newly formed Samajwadi Party (SP; founded in October 1992) emerged as advocates for Muslims, who credited him with supporting them when the Congress government in New Delhi failed to protect the mosque. In the November 1993 assembly polling in Uttar Pradesh, the SP won enough seats to form a coalition government, and the following month Yadav again became chief minister. His tenure this time lasted less than two years, the government falling after the pro-Dalit (a term for Scheduled Castes) Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) left the coalition in 1995 and, with BJP support, took over the government. That action triggered an era of bitter political rivalry between the two parties and between Yadav and BSP leader Kumari Mayawati.

National politics

With Yadav’s party relegated to the sidelines of state government in Uttar Pradesh, he turned his attention to the national political arena. In 1996 he won a seat in the Lok Sabha (lower chamber of the national parliament) and came close to becoming the prime minister of India. He was upstaged in that attempt, however, by the JD’s H.D. Deve Gowda, who had emerged as the consensus candidate of the United Front (UF) coalition government (of which SP was a member). Yadav settled for the minister of defense portfolio in the UF government, which stayed in power until early 1998. He was reelected to the Lok Sabha in 1998 and in 1999.

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Later career

The SP made a dramatic comeback in the 2002 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections, garnering a plurality, but not a majority, of seats. However, after the collapse of a short-lived BSP-BJP coalition government in 2003, the SP put together its own governing coalition, and Yadav became chief minister for the third time. Following the BSP’s trouncing of the SP in the 2007 state assembly elections, Yadav served as leader of opposition in the assembly (2007–09) before being elected again to the Lok Sabha in 2009. In early 2012 the SP won an outright majority in the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections. Yadav retained his leadership of the party, but he stepped aside to allow his son, Akhilesh Yadav, to become the state’s chief minister.

The elder Yadav was reelected in the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha polls, but his party could win only five seats in both elections. The SP, headed by Akhilesh Yadav, improved its performance massively in the Lok Sabha election of 2024, winning 37 out of Uttar Pradesh’s 80 seats. The BJP suffered unexpected electoral losses in the state, winning just 33 seats as compared with results in the previous general elections of 2019, when it won 62 seats in Uttar Pradesh. After Mulayam Singh Yadav’s death in 2022, his constituency was won in a by-poll by his daughter-in-law Dimple Yadav.