Pushed on the back foot after “strong political reactions” from New Delhi, the Akhilesh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party government in Uttar Pradesh restored 24x7 power supply to Rae Bareli and Amethi, parliamentary  constituencies of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, on Friday.

With the onset of summer, Uttar Pradesh reels under a severe power crisis, with peak demand for electricity going up to 11,500 mega watt, while supply from different sources in around 8,000 mega watt. The state faces a shortfall of over 3,000 MW. Moreover, the transmission and distribution losses in the state stand at more than 50 percent, one of the highest in the country.

While the connection between two powers — political and electrical — would seem remote to those sitting elsewhere, in Uttar Pradesh it is a social reality deeply entrenched in the public subconscious, which has been impacting even the voting pattern in the state for years.  

Having lived for 27 years of my life in Barabanki, a small city 27 km to the east of the capital Lucknow, I can now look back and realise how power outages entered our lives in the early nineties, encroached some space in our subconscious by the end of the decade and have seemingly entered our genome by now. Wherever we go, whatever we do, the fear of an outage lurks in our heart all the while. At least, it has not left me so far.

I will present here a short account of the beginning of our electrical troubles and how we innovated ways of setting them right politically.  

I have my earliest recollections beginning with the summer of 1983. This and the next six-seven summers, we did not know what a power outage could be. As a six-year-old, I always had my Campa Cola and Gold Spot (Coca Cola was out of the country then) darned chilled. Power consumption itself was very little. Ceiling fans were a matter of privilege and air coolers in cinema theatres a luxury.   

Towards the end of the decade, we were faced with a peculiar problem: low voltage. Nothing was brilliantly lit ever and our evenings were marked by those depressing tungsten wires in bulbs trying to breathe themselves to half a life. I remember attending many wedding parties where at the end of the feast we were treated to a glassful of vanilla cream which until a few hours earlier was ice. Nonetheless, as kids, we drank that strange-tasting concoction to our hearts.

When our evenings were dimmed by this new voltage problem, my octogenarian grandmother who had lost half of her vision by then presumed she had lost full. Travesty, she did not live to see the day when a few years later we bought a voltage stabliser, which actually stablised nothing; it just lit our house brilliantly at the expense of our sulking neighbours. It's another matter that our accommodating neighbours never grudged this loss and spent their evenings at our place gleefully. They also never grudged the lack of water they suffered due to the motor pump we had installed to address ours.  

After liberalisation of the economy, there was a surge in the sale of electrical appliances. And along came outage. Initially, it was hard to believe for all of us. We changed the wiring of the house when the electricity department put the blame on that; and subsequently also the wire all the way from our house to the electric pole. Nothing changed. Outages came every evening. In ones and twos and then stayed with us for longer hours and then at all hours. Newspapers started carrying information of outages in the city area- and hour-wise. This was precise, however coupled with also the unspecified abrupt outages.

This led to strange changes in the social and facial construction of the town. The curd seller at the nearest corner from my house had the right side of his face blacker than the left, courtesy the green, noisy genset at the jeweller’s to his right. Rising power cuts became an equaliser. The poor and the rich spent their evenings together in the gardens, at the corners and crossroads. Villagers got business as handspun fans and earthen pitchers became necessities. 

On one occasion in 1994, I remember an outage which lasted for 21 days. In the month of June, we writhed in misery, cried our hearts out, tried burning the power substations and assaulted its employees. Nothing worked. Businesses stopped. People were helpless, listless. Every day began with the entire town’s population running after officials who had run to other cities for cover. In the evening of the 21st day, when the electricity was finally restored, we had the roar of a world cup win in our town.  

This was the time we realised — I overheard them in the evening talks of the elders in those gardens, at corners and crossroads — that we had not been sending the right people to the state assembly. Barabanki has one-and-a-half Lok Sabha seats — Barabanki and Faizabad (partial) — and seven assembly seats. After the premature demise of then serving union minister Rafi Ahmed Kidwai saheb, the area was lost to the Congress largely. Under the influence of the leading Socialist Ram Sevak Yadav (he himself represented the city in the Lok Sabha thrice), Barabanki sent to assembly men who were not aligned to the ruling party. Even after our power outage woes began in the early nineties and the political structures in the state assembly also saw a sea change with the Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party and the Bharatiya Janata Party at the helm of political affairs; our voting pattern remained unchanged and our representatives in the assembly remained a divided lot.

Our observation of this trend also got boosts when then chief minister Rajnath Singh won from one of our assembly seats and we had an outage-free spell. In the subsequent elections, we experimented with and gradually mastered this art of sending this brigade of rightly-aligned MLAs to the assembly. Majority from the ruling party or a couple of ministers. Some jackpot equation. In the latest assembly elections in February last year, the district has returned all the seven Samajwadi Party MLAs to the assembly and three of them are state ministers. No wonder then, it enjoys an almost 24X7 power supply.

At times, necessity becomes the mother of invention. And I am sure people in Amethi and Rae Bareli had mastered this art long, long ago.