Biography & Career Overview
Dharmendra Yadav (born 3 February 1979) is a Samajwadi Party parliamentarian from Uttar Pradesh who has served four terms in the Lok Sabha and belongs to the family that built the party's modern organisation in the Etawah–Mainpuri belt. He sits for Azamgarh in the 18th Lok Sabha. He won that seat in June 2024 with 5,08,239 votes and a margin of 1,61,035 over the sitting Bharatiya Janata Party member, the Bhojpuri film actor Dinesh Lal Yadav "Nirahua". Before that he represented Mainpuri from 2004 to 2009 and Budaun from 2009 to 2019. The national parliamentary portal records his father as Abhay Ram Yadav and his mother as the late Jay Devi, and his Wikipedia article states that Abhay Ram was the younger brother of Mulayam Singh Yadav and the elder brother of Shivpal Singh Yadav, which makes the party founder and the former minister his uncles and Akhilesh Yadav his cousin. His record is a useful case study in how constituency allotments move inside a political household: he entered Parliament in the seat his uncle vacated, spent a decade in a seat the family took from another clan, and came back through a seat the family had held and lost. This profile follows the dated record, states where sources disagree, and lists the criminal and financial declarations he signed himself.
Early Life: Saifai and Allahabad
Yadav was born in Saifai, a village and block headquarters in Etawah district, and the national portal's official member profile lists "Vill. & P.O. Saifai, District Etawah" as his permanent address during his years in the Lok Sabha. Saifai sits in the Etawah–Mainpuri country that Mulayam Singh Yadav turned into the Samajwadi Party's organisational heartland, and the family's social and electoral networks are the background to everything in his career. His father Abhay Ram Yadav is described in the portal profile and in the family-tree reporting used by his Wikipedia article as a brother of Mulayam Singh Yadav and of Shivpal Singh Yadav.
He was educated at Allahabad University, one of the institutions that supplied the socialist and Samajwadi movement with much of its leadership. His 2024 election affidavit, as archived by the Association for Democratic Reforms' MyNeta repository, classifies him as postgraduate and gives the degrees with dates: a Bachelor of Laws in 2002 and a Master of Arts in political science in 2004, both from Allahabad University. Wikipedia's account adds that he took part in student politics at the university before working in the party, and the official member profile lists his first public office as block-level.
First Office: The Saifai Block and the 2004 Mainpuri By-Poll
The portal profile records him as Block Pramukh of Saifai from 2003 to 2004, which is the language of elected rural local government. His Wikipedia article instead describes 2003 as the year he became the Samajwadi Party's block president in Saifai, which is party office and not elected panchayat office. This profile prints both readings and does not resolve them, because no primary record was available to settle the point.
His entry to the Lok Sabha came in the Mainpuri constituency, in a by-election. At the 2004 general election Mulayam Singh Yadav won Mainpuri with 4,60,470 votes, 63.96 per cent of the vote polled, and resigned the seat in May 2004. The Wikipedia roll of 14th Lok Sabha members for Uttar Pradesh lists Mulayam against the seat with the note "Resigned in May 2004" and Yadav below him with the note "Elected on 23.12.2004". In that December 2004 by-poll Yadav polled 3,48,999 votes, 62.64 per cent, and defeated Bahujan Samaj Party candidate Ashok Shakya, who took 1,69,286 votes; the margin was 1,79,713 votes on a turnout of 5,57,114 voters, 45.98 per cent. He was twenty-five years old. In the same Parliament he served on the Standing Committee on Defence, and from 5 August 2007 to May 2009 on the Standing Committee on Rural Development. The portal profile credits him with another post in the same years, chairman of the Uttar Pradesh Co-operative Bank from 2005 to 2007.
Budaun: Two Wins and One Close Defeat
For the 2009 general election the party moved him to Budaun, a seat in the western doab that the Samajwadi Party had taken from the Indian National Congress's Saleem Iqbal Shervani. The result was a fractured one. Yadav won with 2,33,744 votes, only 31.70 per cent. D. P. Yadav of the Bahujan Samaj Party took 2,01,202 and Shervani, then in Congress, 1,93,834; the margin was 32,542 votes, 4.41 per cent of the total polled. Another candidate in the same contest, an independent also named Dharmendra Yadav, took 10,368 votes, which matters because search results for the name mix the two records up. Turnout was 52.45 per cent. In the 15th Lok Sabha he joined the Standing Committee on Information Technology on 31 August 2009 and the Committee on Provision of Computers to Members of Lok Sabha on 24 December 2009.
He held Budaun decisively in 2014 with 4,98,378 votes, 48.50 per cent, against Bharatiya Janata Party candidate Vagish Pathak's 3,32,031 and the Bahujan Samaj Party's Akmal Khan at 1,56,973, a margin of 1,66,347 votes on 58.09 per cent turnout. His portal profile lists his third-term committee work as the Committee on Petitions from 1 September 2014, the Standing Committee on Agriculture, and the Consultative Committees of the ministries of Power and of New and Renewable Energy. The 2014 declaration put his assets at about ₹2.50 crore, with no criminal cases.
In 2019, in the Samajwadi Party's alliance with the Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh, he lost Budaun by a narrow margin to the BJP's Sanghmitra Maurya, who polled 5,11,352 votes (47.30 per cent) against his 4,92,898 (45.59 per cent), a difference of 18,454 votes. He stayed in the party's front rank through those years, and the paperwork shows where his own base remained: his 2024 affidavit lists him as enrolled as a voter in the Mainpuri constituency while he was contesting in the east.
Azamgarh: A By-Poll Lost and a Seat Won Back
Azamgarh, in the Purvanchal east, is the seat Akhilesh Yadav won in the 2019 general election with 6,21,578 votes against Nirahua's 3,61,704. Akhilesh Yadav gave up the parliamentary seat after winning the 2022 state assembly election from Karhal, and the resulting by-poll, held in June 2022, was fought by Yadav for the Samajwadi Party. He lost it narrowly. Nirahua polled 3,12,768 votes (34.39 per cent), Yadav 3,04,089 (33.44 per cent), and the margin was 8,679 votes, with the Bahujan Samaj Party's Shah Alam "Guddu Jamali" taking 2,66,210 in a three-way contest. Dainik Jagran reported on 22 April 2024 that the party had again chosen him to face the sitting member, and described Azamgarh as a Samajwadi fort in which the BJP's advance in eastern Uttar Pradesh stalls.
The 2024 general election returned the seat to the party and returned him to Parliament for a fourth term. Yadav polled 5,08,239 votes, 48.20 per cent, against Nirahua's 3,47,204 (32.93 per cent), a margin of 1,61,035 votes, or 15.27 per cent of the votes cast, on a turnout of 10,54,520 voters, 56.45 per cent. His 2024 declaration listed total assets of ₹13,50,32,793 and liabilities of ₹3,42,45,511, and four pending criminal cases. The Budaun seat he once held went the same year to Aditya "Ankur" Yadav, the son of Shivpal Singh Yadav, so the family held two Uttar Pradesh parliamentary seats at once through two cousin-generation politicians.
The Self-Declared Record
Candidate affidavits are signed statements, and this profile reports them as what he declared, not as findings against him. Yadav's declared assets rose across five elections: about ₹56.82 lakh in 2009, about ₹2.50 crore in 2014, about ₹11.87 crore and then about ₹12.98 crore in filings associated with the 2019 general election and the 2022 by-poll, and ₹13.50 crore in 2024 with ₹3.42 crore of liabilities. His occupation in the 2024 affidavit is given as agriculture and pension from the Lok Sabha, that is, the annuity payable to former members. The immovable property he declared is concentrated in the Etawah country of his birth: agricultural land in the villages of Saifai, Muchara, Haripur and Ramayapur, a non-agricultural plot in the Friendas Colony of Itawa, a house in Budaun and a larger residence at Saifai, with the market value he assigned totalling about ₹11.37 crore across himself and his spouse.
Four pending criminal cases and no conviction appear in that 2024 filing. Two arose from 2019 first information reports in Prayagraj, one at Colonganj police station carrying sections that include 147, 148 and 149 of the Indian Penal Code along with sections 307, 332, 333, 353, 435, 436 and 511, and one at Civil Lines police station with sections including 147, 148, 149, 186, 283, 353, 427 and 505. A third, registered at Civil Lines Budaun in 2022, lists electoral offences under sections 171F and 171H together with provisions of the Disaster Management Act and the Epidemic Diseases Act, and the affidavit records that charges were framed against him on 21 December 2023 before the special court for members of Parliament and members of the Legislative Assembly at Budaun. The fourth is a 2024 case registered at Mehnagar in Azamgarh district under sections 188 and 171H. Nothing here has been adjudicated to be true, and the charges are as he stated them.
Family and the Extended Yadav Network
He married Neelam Yadav on 12 February 2010; the portal profile gives that date as his anniversary and names her as his spouse. The two records then part company on children. The official member profile as it stood in 2018 lists zero sons and zero daughters, while his Wikipedia infobox currently records two children. This profile prints the disagreement and takes neither side.
His siblings are listed in his Wikipedia article as one brother, Anurag Yadav, and two sisters, Sandhya Singh Yadav and Sheela Yadav. Anurag Yadav contested the 2017 Uttar Pradesh assembly election from Sarojini Nagar in Lucknow on a Samajwadi Party ticket and lost. The marriage link that reaches outside Uttar Pradesh runs through Sheela: her son Rahul Yadav married Dr Isha Yadav, a daughter of Sadhu Yadav, the former Gopalganj member of Parliament who is the brother of Rabri Devi and therefore the brother-in-law of Lalu Prasad Yadav. That marriage joins this Etawah household into the Bihar side of the Yadav political network as well as the Uttar Pradesh one. The affidavit data adds the practical detail: his declared income routes through farms in Etawah, and his voter enrolment stayed in Mainpuri while he sat for a seat 300 kilometres east.
Why They Matter to This Archive
Yadav is the least written-about member of the Saifai household in the archive's collection, and the one whose career explains the others better than a headline does. Mulayam Singh Yadav founded the party and the family's electoral system, Shivpal Singh Yadav fought and lost the succession war, and Akhilesh Yadav and Dimple Yadav hold the seats that the public knows. In between stands a nephew who was placed in his uncle's vacated seat at twenty-five, spent ten years holding Budaun against the Yadav rival D. P. Yadav and the Shervani interest, lost it by fewer than nineteen thousand votes, and came back through a seat the family had lost and re-won. That is how a party machine recruits and redeploys its second tier, and the record for it survives only in election filings and committee lists. On the question this site meets constantly, whether a surname is evidence, the answer here is different: the family's identity as brothers and sons is stated by the sources, so the archive includes him on documented lineage rather than on the surname alone. The community's own history is documented separately at the origins of the Yadav community, and the standards applied to this page are set out in the guides to verified personalities.
How This Profile Was Verified
The spine of this article is the official member profile on the National Portal of India, which carries the birth date, parents' names, permanent address, degrees, the list of committees with their joining dates and the 2003–04 block office. The page returned a server error when checked on 1 October 2026, so the citations here are to an archived copy of it dated 9 August 2018, which covers his first three terms. Electoral figures, margins and turnouts are taken from the constituency result tables in the English Wikipedia articles for Mainpuri, Budaun and Azamgarh, which cite the Election Commission of India's statistical reports; the Commission's own 2024 result page for Azamgarh returned a not-found error when checked on 1 October 2026, so those numbers were not re-derived from the Commission's live site. The financial and criminal declarations come from the Association for Democratic Reforms' MyNeta archive of the 2024 affidavit. Hindi coverage comes from Dainik Jagran's report of 22 April 2024 and Amar Ujala's report of 27 June 2022 on the by-poll. Two disagreements in the record are printed as disagreements and left unsettled: Block Pramukh in the official profile against party block president in Wikipedia, and no children in the official profile against two children in the current infobox. Dainik Jagran's figure of 6,23,578 votes for Akhilesh Yadav in 2019 differs from the 6,21,578 in the Commission-cited result table, and the lower figure is used. The Hindi Wikipedia entry on him was checked and rejected as a source because it misclassifies him as a Bharatiya Janata Party member of Parliament. No freely licensed photograph of him exists on Wikimedia Commons, so this page carries a placeholder portrait instead of an unrelated image. Where any statement here conflicts with a published filing, the corrections policy explains how to have it amended, normally inside 72 hours.
