Yadav was admitted to the Gurgaon hospital on October 2 with breathing problems and kidney complications, since then he was on life support. He was in and out of the hospital for various issues for the past three years.
Death of Mulayam Singh Yadav: Live Updates
Three-time Chief Minister, Seven-time MP and 10-time MLA, Soft Backward politics was the mainstay of politics in the post-Mandal era following his phenomenal rise in the political arena of UP. He was ‘Dharti Putra’ (son of the soil) and ‘Netaji’ to his followers.
A disciple of Ram Manohar Lohia, he tried to carry on his legacy and his socialist movement became the pivot of anti-Congress after the grand old party was wiped out from India’s largest state in 1989. The Samajwadi Party he formed in 1992 came. It came to power four times in the state and is the single largest opposition party even after the BJP’s resurgence in 2017.
Mulayam also established himself as a champion of minorities, even calling him ‘Mulla’ after ordering firing on kar sevaks going to Ayodhya for a kar seva near the disputed site during his first term in October 1990. He was given the title of ‘Mulayam’. Tenure as CM.
His political legacy also includes a galaxy of leaders who flourished under his patronage. From Janeshwar Mishra to Beni Prasad Verma, from Amar Singh to Azam Khan, everyone was associated with his outfit. In his own family there was a CM (Akhilesh Yadav) and several MPs (Ram Gopal, Dimple, Dharmendra), MLAs and ministers (Shivpali) At one time, more than 20 members of the family were elected representatives at various levels from the Panchayat to the Parliament.
Born on 22 November 1939 in Saifai village of Etawah district to a farmer’s house. Sugar Singh Yadav And Murti Devi, Mulayam was fond of wrestling. He finished the game to pin his opponent in politics. Politicians like Ajit Singh, Sonia GandhiMamata Banerjee and even her own brother Shivpal Yadav and man Friday Amar Singh have been at the end of their ‘charkha feast’.
He started his political career in the heat and dust of Etawah and Mainpuri in the early 60s under the tutelage of Nathu Singh, the then Jaswantnagar MLA and socialist leader. He was also a wrestling enthusiast and was so impressed with Mulayam’s skills that he offered him his seat in the 1967 state elections. Mulayam won from Jaswantnagar on Samyukta Socialist Party ticket to become MLA for the first time.
He won the seat six more times till 1993, representing 1994 (BKD), 1977 (BLD), 1985 (Lok Dal), 1989 (Janata Dal), 1991 (SJP), 1993 (SP). The only time he lost in this seat or any election was in 1980, when he was defeated by Congress’s Balram Yadav.
After the defeat, Lok Dal chief Chaudhary Charan Singh sent him Legislative AssemblyWhere he was elected Leader of the Opposition. In 1985, he won back his traditional seat and in the next election in 1989, was part of the Janata Dal led by VP Singh. The Congress was defeated both at the Center and in the state. With the support of the BJP, VP Singh and Mulayam took over as PM and CM respectively, which was emerging as a political force on the back of the Ram Mandir movement. Left parties also supported the VP Singh government at the Centre.
In October 1990, after VP Singh implemented the Mandal Commission report for 27% reservation in government jobs for Other Backward Classes, the BJP called it a ploy to divide Hindus. It withdrew support from the Singh government, which eventually fell, but Mulayam survived with the help of the Congress and joined forces with Chandrashekhar, who replaced VP Singh with just 40 MPs in his favor.
The same month, when BJP president LK Advani began his Rath Yatra from Somnath to Ayodhya in support of the Ram temple, thousands of kar sevaks started marching towards the temple town for a kar seva on October 30. With the situation unsettled, Mulayam ordered firing on kar sevaks. Twenty-eight of them were killed when Mulayam claimed that ‘not even a bird can fly in Ayodhya’ (even a parinda cannot kill).
This move earned him the nickname ‘Mulla Mulayam’ and badly hurt him in the 1991 mid-term elections. As soon as the BJP came to power with an absolute majority, Mulayam’s Janata Party could win only 34 seats. However, he formed the SP in October 1992 and turned to the saffron party by bringing together backward and Dalit forces in alliance with Kanshi Ram’s Bahujan Samaj Party.
The alliance came to power with the slogan ‘Mile Mulayam Kanshi Ram, Hawa mein ud gaye Jai Shri Ram’ (making fun of the BJP’s ‘Jai Shri Ram’ slogan) and Mulayam took over as the Chief Minister for the second time. However, the alliance crashed due to underlying differences and the BSP pulled out of the government. In Lucknow’s State Guest House, SP workers tried to take BSP leader Mayawati hostage. Mayawati took over as the first Dalit woman CM of the state with the support of BJP. Since then the bitter rivalry of SP-BSP started.
In 1996, Mulayam became an MP for the first time from Mainpuri. He came close to getting the PM’s chair, but had to settle for the post of Defense Minister for the next two years. Re-elected from Mainpuri Lok Sabha seat in 1998 but moved to Sambhal and Kannauj in 1999 and won both the seats. Also won from Mainpuri in 2004, 2009, 2014 and 2019. Also won from Azamgarh in 2014 and left Mainpuri, which was won by grandson Tej Pratap in the by-election.
he famously stopped Sonia Gandhi became PM in 1998 after the Vajpayee-led NDA government lost the trust vote. Relying on their support, Sonia claimed the support of 272 MPs, but Mulayam backed down citing his ‘foreign origin’.
After the fall of the BSP-BJP government in 2003, Mulayam formed his own coalition government. Engineering the split in the BSP and drawing support from a separate Congress group, he took over as chief minister for the third and last time. The remaining term of the government lasted till 2007. His second family – wife Sadhna Gupta and son Prateek – were first seen in public in 2003.
He lost to Mayawati’s BSP in 2007, and 2009 saw his feud with two of his trusted aides – Azam Khan and Amar Singh. Both were shown the door, Azam for a short time and Amar for a full six years. In the same year, he experimented with a tie with Kalyan Singh’s fledgling outfit. This briefly stunned his ‘loyal’ Muslim supporters, who turned to the Congress, which won its highest victory of 21 seats since the 1990s.
In 2012, when the SP won the assembly election with 224 seats, Mulayam tried to settle the issue of succession in the family by handing over the reins to his elder son, Akhilesh Yadav, who became CM at the age of 39.
However, the 2014 Lok Sabha elections saw the SP as one of the worst-hit out of five seats in UP. In this attack, only the members of the Yadav family narrowly survived. Mulayam himself in Azamgarh and Mainpuri, daughter-in-law Dimple in Kannauj and Badaun and Firozabad are the nephews of Dharmendra and Akshay respectively.
However, there was more struggle left for him. In 2016, he witnesses a bitter family feud between Akhilesh and brother Shivpal. Mulayam initially played a neutral role but his later moves have led political observers to speculate that he had made the last move to wrestle his son to be his successor.