Do we like Akhilesh Yadav?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Decent on the evidence we could open, with no harmful words found, but a thin record on LGBTQ+ issues and no deep dive on his time in government.
Akhilesh Yadav was born in 1973 in Saifai, in Etawah district, the son of Samajwadi Party founder Mulayam Singh Yadav. He went to military school in Rajasthan, studied engineering and also spent time at the University of Sydney. So he is a rare Indian politician with an environmental engineering background, which is a nice detail for a planet-minded page.
He entered the Lok Sabha from Kannauj in 2000 and became Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh on 15 March 2012. At 38 he was the youngest person to hold that job. He stood down after the Samajwadi-Congress alliance lost to the BJP in 2017, and he has since led the opposition in the state assembly and now in the Lok Sabha.
The big shadow over him is an old disproportionate assets case. It began with a 2005 petition by a Congress worker, alleging his family had wealth beyond known income, and the Supreme Court ordered a CBI inquiry in 2007. The CBI told the court in 2019 that it had closed that preliminary inquiry in 2013 and found no cognisable offence. Nobody was convicted, so treat it as an allegation that fizzled.
On the harm check, we found no slurs, conspiracy-mongering or campaigning against any group. In April 2026 he said his party backs women's reservation but wants a share for backward-class women, and he argued the government's haste was aimed at avoiding a caste census. We found nothing from him either way on LGBTQ+ or trans rights, so that part is genuinely a gap, not a pass earned.
The recent stoush is the Ram Temple donations row. In late June 2026 he wrote on X that the BJP was involved in alleged embezzlement of donations and that its mask of devotion had slipped. That is his allegation as an opposition leader, and the report we read carried no response from the BJP, so where you land depends on whether you read it as accountability or as election-year point-scoring.
He is a combative opposition politician who talks up his own campaign wins, saying in a 2022 interview that he had learnt how to defeat the BJP. That election did not go his way, which tells you he is better at promising than at closing. The record we could open does not include his years in government in depth, so the meter stays at a cautious seven.