Akhilesh Yadav

Akhilesh Yadav (born July 1, 1973, Saifai, Uttar Pradesh, India) is an Indian politician and president of the Samajwadi Party, a socialist political party largely based in the key electoral state of Uttar Pradesh, which sends the highest number of elected representatives to the houses of the Indian parliament, Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha. He served as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh from 2012 to 2017. At age 38, he was the youngest to be elected to the position.

Family and early life

Yadav was born in Saifai, a village in the Etawah district in Uttar Pradesh, located in north-central India. He is the son of political stalwart Mulayam Singh Yadav, founder of the Samajwadi Party and former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. He was educated in Saifai and then in the city of Etawah. He progressed to the Dholpur Military School in Rajasthan, then received a degree in civil engineering from the JSS Science and Technology University in Mysore, Karnataka. He earned a master’s degree in environmental engineering from the University of Sydney in Australia. In November 1999 he married Dimple Yadav, who later became a member of the Lok Sabha (the lower house of India’s parliament).

Political career

Akhilesh Yadav’s political career began in 2000 when he was elected to the Lok Sabha from the Kannauj constituency in Uttar Pradesh. He was reelected for the next two terms, each lasting four years. During his Lok Sabha tenure, he served on various parliamentary committees, including science and technology and urban development.

Yadav also served on a prominent joint parliamentary committee formed to examine pricing and allotment of telecom licenses after A. Raja, the telecom minister in an Indian National Congress-led coalition government (2004–14), was accused of corruption in the allocation of 2G spectrum licenses. The 30-member committee was composed of politicians from across parties and submitted its report in 2013. The report cleared Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of wrongdoing. Raja was eventually acquitted in 2017.

Yadav moved from central politics to his home state when Mulayam Singh Yadav gave him charge of the Uttar Pradesh unit of the Samajwadi Party in 2009. The party was in need of resuscitation, having been voted out of power in the state assembly elections of 2007 by the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and performing poorly in the Lok Sabha elections of 2009. When Akhilesh Yadav took over, he injected the party with a fresh youthful energy and focused on winning back voters who had become disenchanted with a perceived slide in the socialist and secular ideals that the Samajwadi Party had been founded on.

Chief minister of Uttar Pradesh

Yadav’s progressive views and youth agenda as well as a more prominent stance on education and development appealed to voters. In 2012 the once-floundering Samajwadi Party cruised to a landslide victory in the assembly elections, winning 224 of the 403 seats and ousting the BSP from power. Yadav, credited as the architect of the party’s renewed success, was elected to the state legislative assembly from the Azamgarh constituency. In March 2012 he was sworn in as the 20th and youngest chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, an office his father had held twice.

During his chief ministership, Yadav presided over a number of reform measures and improvements in infrastructure in Uttar Pradesh. These included the completion of the six-lane Agra-Lucknow Expressway, the construction and inauguration of the Lucknow Metro mass rapid transit system, social welfare and housing programs for the underprivileged rural population, a statewide centralized emergency response system intended to provide relief to women from sexual harassment, and a free 24-hour ambulance service.

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Return to central politics

In 2017 the Samajwadi Party-Indian National Congress alliance lost the state assembly elections to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and Yogi Adityanath, one of the BJP’s most prominent Hindutva leaders, ascended to the chief minister’s post. Yadav subsequently won both the 2019 Lok Sabha elections from Kannauj and the 2022 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections from Karhal. He was reelected to the Lok Sabha in the 2024 elections and opted to retain his seat in the Indian parliament, vacating the assembly constituency of Karhal.

The 2024 Lok Sabha election result in Uttar Pradesh was both unexpected and remarkable. The BJP suffered significant electoral losses in the state, winning 33 of 80 seats, a sharp decline from the 62 seats it had won in 2019. The Samajwadi Party had the biggest gains in Uttar Pradesh, winning 37 seats and forming a key part of the opposition in the Lok Sabha along with the Indian National Congress.