NEW DELHI: Sharad Yadav, a key player in Delhi’s power politics, passed away on Thursday night after a long illness. He will be remembered as a leading figure of the anti-Congress movements. He started his political career with the JP movement, joined VP Singh’s crusade against the Congress and joined the BJP’s Atal Bihari Vajpayee government from 1999-2004.
A strong votary of social justice and secular democracy, Yadav was a voice of sanity in Parliament and outside. His views were respected by both sides of the well in Parliament, both in the Lok Sabha as well as the Rajya Sabha. He was honoured as an outstanding parliamentarian. He did, however, slip once when he termed modern and educated women ‘par-kati’. He said this in Parliament while opposing the women’s reservation bill. He argued that the bulk of the seats reserved for women would be cornered by modern women.
Barring this one misstep, Yadav traversed his almost five decades of a political career with remarkable finesse. A Lohiaite from Madhya Pradesh, Yadav rose to prominence as a student leader while studying engineering at Jabalpur. When the JP movement started in 1974, Sharad Yadav was one of the leading youth leaders in MP, while his contemporaries in Bihar were Lalu Prasad Yadav and Nitish Kumar.
Riding the JP wave, he entered Lok Sabha at the age of 27 from Jabalpur. He was elected to the LS seven times and to the RS three times. He was part of the leaders who formed the Janata Dal in 1987. The JD, under the leadership of VP Singh, allied with the BJP in the 1989 elections and wrested power from Congress. The alliance first won state elections and swept to power at the Centre subsequently with the slogan “chakra-kamal ki yari hai, ab Dilli ki baari hai."
He became the working president of the JD in 1995 and two years later he was named its president. The JD, however, got divided into two in 1999 when he decided to join the Vajpayee government. The JD under Yadav was rechristened JD(U). In 2003 George Fernandes’ Samata Party merged into JD(U).
In the Modi years, Yadav remained mostly our of the power circuit. In 2018, he formed the Loktantrik Janata Dal, which later merged with Lalu’s RJD. At the time of the merger he had said that this was a new beginning. But his health failed him.