Jaswant Singh Yadav

Jaswant Singh Yadav died at 8.15 am on Sunday 8 November 2026 at a hospital in Jaipur. He was 73. News reports, including The Hindu, PTI and Hindustan Times, said he had been in a prolonged battle with cancer. Dainik Bhaskar reported that he had been under treatment at Mahatma Gandhi Hospital in Jaipur and that chief minister Bhajanlal Sharma had visited him there in the previous month.

His son, Mohit Yadav, announced the death in a social media post. He wrote that it was with profound sorrow that he informed people his father, the sitting MLA from Behror, a former cabinet minister and a former MP from Alwar, was no longer with them, and said his father's affection, simplicity and commitment to society would remain in people's memories.

The family said his mortal remains would be kept at his residence in Jaswant Nagar, Alwar, for public homage after 4 pm on 8 November, and that last rites would be performed at 3 pm on Monday 9 November 2026 in Silpata. Rajasthan governor Haribhau Bagde expressed his condolences. Former chief minister Vasundhara Raje said the death was extremely sad and painful and that Yadav had made significant contributions to the region's development and public welfare. Former Congress chief minister Ashok Gehlot called him an experienced leader with a long public life.

His death reduced the strength of the Rajasthan Legislative Assembly to 199. A by-election to the Behror seat is expected within six months.

Jaswant Singh Yadav was born on 5 August 1953 in Silpata, a village then in Kotkasim tehsil of Alwar district in Rajasthan and now in Khairthal-Tijara district. His father was Surat Singh Yadav and his mother was Chandrawati Yadav.

He received his early education in the village, completed higher secondary school in Alwar and attended college in Ajmer. He then studied at A and U Tibbia College of the University of Delhi, taking a Bachelor of Ayurveda, Medicine and Surgery degree in 1980. Alongside politics he worked as a physician and farmer and described himself as a social worker.

Yadav's public life began in the Congress party. In the 1980s he was associated with the Youth Congress in Rajasthan. He later served as president of the Alwar district Congress committee and, from 1995 to 1998, as zila pramukh of the Alwar zila parishad. He subsequently joined the Bharatiya Janata Party.

In 1998 he was elected to the Rajasthan Legislative Assembly from Mundawar, his first assembly win. In 1999 he was elected to the 13th Lok Sabha from the Alwar parliamentary constituency, succeeding Ghasi Ram Yadav, and resigned his assembly seat. He served in the Lok Sabha until 2004 and was a member of the committee on defence in 1999 and 2000, as well as other parliamentary committees. He later held organisational posts in the Rajasthan BJP, including as a state minister of the party in the early 2000s.

He shifted his assembly base to Behror and won the seat for the BJP in 2008, defeating Karan Singh Yadav, and retained it in 2013. On 10 December 2016 he was appointed a cabinet minister in the government led by Vasundhara Raje. He held charge of labour and employment, skills development, factory and boilers inspection, employees' state insurance and industrial training institutes until the government left office on 17 December 2018.

In 2018 he contested a Lok Sabha by-election from Alwar and did not win. Some of his remarks during that campaign drew a complaint to the Election Commission and wide news coverage. In the assembly election later that year the BJP fielded his son Mohit Yadav from Behror; Mohit came third behind independent candidate Baljeet Yadav and the Congress nominee. Yadav returned to the assembly in December 2023, defeating Baljeet Yadav, and represented Behror until his death on 8 November 2026. He was a four-time MLA and a one-term member of parliament.

Yadav married Dr Kiran Yadav on 4 December 1979. They had one son, Mohit Yadav, who later contested the Behror assembly seat for the BJP, and one daughter. The family home in Alwar was in the Jaswant Nagar neighbourhood, and his native village remained Silpata. He was known professionally and among constituents as Dr Jaswant Singh Yadav because of his Ayurvedic medical qualification.

Yadav was for many years one of the BJP's established figures in the Alwar and Behror belt of north-eastern Rajasthan. He moved from local Congress office and the zila parishad into the state assembly, the Lok Sabha and the state cabinet, and he remained closely identified with Behror even in the years when he was out of the house. Colleagues remembered him as a leader whose long public life was rooted in that region. After his death, tributes came from both the BJP and the Congress, and from the state governor.