LUCKNOW: Sadhna Gupta, the second wife of Samajwadi Party patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav, passed away at the Medanta hospital in Gurgaon on Saturday. She had reportedly been suffering from a lung infection and had been in critical condition for the past few days. She was 62.
UP chief minister
Yogi Adityanath condoled her death, calling it “extremely sad”. He said: “My condolences are with her family.
May God give her place in heaven and strength to her family to bear this loss.” Samajwadi Party expressed its condolences through a tweet from its official handle, calling it 'extremely saddening'.
Gupta had been in and out of hospital for the past few months after she was infected with Covid-19 in 2021. Her condition had deteriorated a few days ago and Mulayam Singh Yadav had gone to Gurgaon to visit her on Saturday.
Gupta, Yadav’s second wife, was the stepmother of former UP chief minister Akhilesh Yadav, Mulayam’s eldest son. She hailed from Bidhuna tehsil in Etawah district. Prateek Yadav, husband of now BJP leader Aparna Yadav, is her son from her first marriage. She and her husband reportedly separated about two years after their son was born in 1987.
Mulayam Singh’s first wife Malti Devi passed away in 2003 and the SP patriarch formally gave the status of his wife to Sadhna Gupta the same year when he took over as the UP CM for the third time.
A young Akhilesh is also believed to have been very unhappy with his father’s second marriage and reportedly shared a tense relation with his stepmother though there is very little in the public domain about the two having said anything against each other.
It is widely believed that Mulayam and Sadhna came in touch in the early 1980s but the two came close when she was looking after Mulayam’s ailing mother at the Saifai hospital where she was working as a nurse. A version of events suggests that the nurse in charge of his mother, Murti Devi, was about to administer her an incorrect injection and was stopped by Sadhna, a move that brought Mulayam and her closer.
Sadhna took a backseat from active politics post her marriage to Mulayam but her role in the family feud ahead of the 2017 UP assembly polls has been a topic of significant discussion. Akhilesh's supporters also blamed Sadhna for the feud that ultimately caused the fall of the SP government in 2017. Her daughter-in-law Aparna shifted to BJP recently after having unsuccessfully contested elections from SP. Gupta’s brother Pramod also moved to BJP earlier this year. His son, Prateek, is into real estate business and has no interest in politics.