By Ananya Sharma 
Lucknow, May 13: Prateek Yadav is gone. He was 38. That sentence alone should not make sense. Thirty-eight is not an age at which people are supposed to die. But here we are, on a Wednesday morning in Lucknow, and the younger son of Mulayam Singh Yadav was declared dead before the city had even properly woken up.
He was brought to the Civil Hospital sometime around six in the morning. Doctors took one look and said what nobody wants to hear. Brought dead. Meaning he was already gone before the ambulance reached the gate.
The why is still not clear. Post-mortem is happening as you read this. We will know more when the report comes. Until then, anything said about cause of death is just noise.
A Family Already Familiar With Loss
Mulayam Singh Yadav, the man who built the Samajwadi Party from scratch, died in October 2022. He was 82. UP politics has never quite been the same since. And now his younger son is dead too, not even four years later.
That is two losses in one family, in under four years. Whatever you think of the Yadavs politically, that is simply a hard thing to sit with.
Prateek was Mulayam’s son from his second wife, Sadhna Yadav. Akhilesh Yadav, who currently leads the SP and has been Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, is his half-brother. The two were not from the same mother but they were family. Akhilesh had reportedly visited Prateek at Medanta Hospital just weeks ago when he was admitted there. Things seemed to stabilise. Prateek came back home.
And then this morning happened.
He Was Never the Political One
Here is the thing about Prateek Yadav that most people outside Lucknow probably did not know. He simply was not interested in politics. At all.
His father ran a party. His half-brother became Chief Minister. His wife joined the BJP. And Prateek? He opened a gym.
The gym was called The Fitness Planet. He ran it in Lucknow and by all accounts took it seriously. He had studied in the UK, at the University of Leeds, came back, got into real estate, got into fitness, and built a life that had nothing to do with vote counting or election rallies.
He also ran something called Jeev Ashray. An organisation that rescued stray dogs and cared for them. Not a glamorous cause. Not a headline-grabbing one. Just something he quietly put effort into because, apparently, he cared about it.
He liked expensive cars. He lived comfortably, the way you do when your last name is Yadav in Uttar Pradesh. But he was not someone you would spot on a campaign stage or see giving soundbites outside the Vidhan Sabha. That was just not who he was.
In a family where almost everyone is defined by politics, that is actually a pretty significant choice.
The Wife Situation Was Complicated
If there was one part of Prateek’s life that kept pulling him back into public conversation, it was his marriage to Aparna Yadav.
Aparna is no ordinary figure. She is currently the vice-chairperson of the UP Women’s Commission and an active member of the BJP. So while her husband’s half-brother was running the Samajwadi Party, she was working with their biggest rival. At election time, that made for some genuinely awkward optics.
The couple had a daughter together.
But in the months leading up to his death, things were clearly not okay between them. Earlier this year, Prateek reportedly went public with his frustrations, posting on Instagram and calling Aparna selfish, according to India TV News. There were reports of a possible separation. Where exactly things stood between them at the time of his death, nobody outside the family can say with certainty.
What is clear is that the marriage had become a complicated thing, carrying personal pain on top of all the political symbolism the public had already loaded onto it.
Why This Hits Different
Political families in India lose people all the time. Condolences pour in, flags are lowered, tributes are read out in assemblies. It becomes routine after a while, in a sad and mechanical way.
This one feels a little different, and it is hard to explain exactly why without sounding sentimental.
Maybe it is the age. Thirty-eight means there was so much life still left. A daughter who is still young. Businesses still running. No goodbye that anyone saw coming.
Maybe it is the fact that Prateek was, against all odds, someone who tried to live quietly. He did not want the spotlight. He actively avoided the political circus that swallowed most of his family. He was trying to just be a person, with a gym and some stray dogs and a life that was mostly his own.
And yet his name will always carry the weight of who his father was. That is not something you get to put down, no matter how far you step back from the party office.
What Happens Now
The post-mortem results will come. The cause of death will be made official. Condolences from political leaders across party lines are already coming in, and more will follow through the day.
Akhilesh Yadav has lost a brother. That is the personal reality behind all the political language that will get used in the next few days.
UP politics will continue. The Samajwadi Party will continue. The Yadav name will continue to dominate conversations about the state’s future.
But Prateek will not be in any of those conversations. He never really was, and he probably preferred it that way.
He was 38 years old. He ran a gym, cared for stray dogs, drove fancy cars, loved his daughter, and lived most of his life just outside the frame of the photograph that everyone else in his family seemed to want to be in.
That is not a small thing. That is, in its own way, a life.
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- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
Sandeep Verma