Yadav has made of Uttar Pradesh’s electricity woes an election issue, even going so far as to say the voters will ‘wash and thrash the BJP and hang it out to dry’ in next year’s polls. This comes as people are voicing their displeasure with the power cuts, while the state touts a grid that is performing at record levels.
He is calling the blackouts a failure of leadership, not some kind of plot, and he has put Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath in his sights. Then there is Energy Minister AK Sharma; Yadav has been hard on him for what he sees as a lack of coordination from the top when the state needs some firm direction.
Opposition questions coordination amid outages
The Samajwadi Party leader has been asking if the power minister is even in the room for the CM’s review meetings. He has even put the government on notice to put up a picture of the two of them to show they are of one mind. It’s the kind of thing that gives a consumer some peace of mind, he says.
On top of that, he has pointed to PAC being put out at substations and BJP lawmakers writing to their own side to stave off public ire. “There is no current left in the BJP anymore,” was his way of putting it.
He made the same point in a post on social media, in Hindi, and told people they should have some proof of how these men are working together.
To put it in perspective, here is what Yadav is saying:
– The outages are on the government, not a conspiracy
– We want to know if the power minister is part of the reviews
– Put up a photo to show you are in step
– You can see the fear of backlash in the use of the PAC
Government cites record supply and demand surge
You won’t hear that from the other side. They will tell you the system is churning out more power than before. The state says it hit 31,824 MW of peak demand at 10:29 pm on May 24, which is more than Maharashtra’s 29,463 MW in the same window. They are hailing it as the best any state has done this year.
AK Sharma, the energy minister, put it this way: we have ‘broken our own record.’ He was referring to the 31,000+ MW we saw at 2:33 AM and 31,774 by 10:01 PM on Sunday. “It could be 32,000 tonight,” he said, calling it a high-water mark for the state and the country.
The numbers from the U.P. State Load Dispatch Centre make it plain why the grid is under strain. We are looking at a 113% increase in consumption since 2012-13, with daily average use up from 209.8 MU to 445.7 MU. It’s a bigger, more demanding network now.
Back in 2025, 31,486 MW was the ceiling. The government is using the new figures to show that with the right infrastructure, you can keep the power on for longer and for more people.
Why power has become a ballot issue
When the weather is hot and the lights go out, it doesn’t take much to get people riled up. Yadav is trying to fan that by making an issue of how things are run, and the government is pointing to its records to show it has its act together.
This is more than just words. If the opposition can make a case that the PAC at the substations is about covering up rather than solving, they will. But the record peaks give the government cover to say they are handling an unrelenting load.
What to watch next
Don’t be surprised if the opposition keeps after the government for some evidence of unity and makes a show of local outages. In return, you’ll see the state come back with the latest on load and response times. In the end, it’s up to the voter to decide if the power is there and if either side is really listening to what’s happening on the ground.
