Mulayam Singh Yadav death: Samajwadi Party's patron and former UP CM Mulayam Singh Yadav passed at the age of 82 on Monday morning. He breathed his last at Medanta Hospital in Gurugram. Soon after the former SP chief's death, UP CM Yogi Adityanath declared a three-day state mourning while the rest of the country offered condolences. However, we'll tell you about a landmark reform by late SP chief.
Mulayam's decision during his tenure as Defense Minister
Mulayam Singh was the Defense Minister of the country from June 1, 1996 to March 19, 1998. Before Mulayam's time, for many years after the independence, when a soldier got martyred on the border, instead of his body, the cap was sent home. But Mulayam Singh changed this custom and made a law, wherein if a soldier is martyred, then his body has to be delivered to his house with state honours. Apart from this, India had made a deal for Sukhoi-30 fighter aircraft as soon as Mulayam was Defense Minister.
SP founder, strategist and trained wrestler
Samajwadi Party founder, strategist and trained wrestler, Mulayam Singh Yadav was a pivot for opposition politics for decades and a veteran of many a political battle in his home ‘akhara’ Uttar Pradesh whose influence transcended boundaries of the state. The 82-year-old SP patriarch was “Netaji” for his supporters, the doughty fighter who spawned Uttar Pradesh’s most powerful political clan and never went off the radar - even when he was ailing.
Yadav, who founded the SP in 1992 as the campaign for a Ram temple was peaking, was seen as a critical secular counterpoint to the rise of Hindutva politics in the Hindi heartland. “Netaji sansad mein hote hain ya sadak pe,” his supporters would say often, testifying to his connect with the people as well as his national profile.
Born on November 22, 1939 into a farming family in Saifai near Etawah in Uttar Pradesh, Yadav was elected MLA 10 times and MP, mostly from Mainpuri and Azamgarh, seven times. Yadav was also the defence minister (1996-98), and chief minister thrice (1989-91, 1993-95, and 2003-07). And briefly, he even appeared to have a shot at the prime minister’s post.
For decades, he enjoyed the stature of a national leader but UP largely remained the “akhara” where Yadav played out his politics, beginning as a teenager who was influenced by socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia. For party workers, even when he was no longer the SP president as the mantle passed on to his son Akhilesh Yadav in 2017, the patriarch remained “Netaji”.
And his presence on the scene provided the glue that held the Yadav clan together, at least to a degree.
Socialist and pragmatist
A “socialist”, Yadav was open to possibilities in politics. Thanks often to mergers and splits, he had been affiliated with a series of parties -- Lohia’s Sanyukt Socialist Party, Charan Singh’s Bharatiya Kranti Dal, Bharatiya Lok Dal and Samajwadi Janata Party. He founded his own SP in 1992.
Yadav struck deals with the Bahujan Samaj Party, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress whenever needed to form or save the governments led by him in Uttar Pradesh.
In 2019, Netaji sprang a surprise by praising Narendra Modi in Parliament, wishing that he would return as prime minister after the next election. This, was when his party saw Modi’s BJP as its main rival in UP. The remark baffled analysts.
Also Read: Mulayam Singh Yadav death: From wrestler to 'Netaji'- his undaunted political journey in 10 points
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