Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra has alleged that farmers’ welfare in Uttar Pradesh is limited to advertisements and billboards and highlighted the problems they have been facing in the BJP-ruled state.

“The BJP (government) in Uttar Pradesh has limited the issue of farmers’ welfare to advertisements and billboards,” Priyanka, the Congress general secretary in charge of eastern Uttar Pradesh, tweeted in Hindi on Wednesday.

“Farmers are not receiving their dues. Although they don’t get sufficient power, the tariff of electricity has been increased. They have been ditched in the name of loan waiver. They are also being insulted,” Priyanka added.

The Congress leader uploaded along with the tweet a news report on the purported suicide of a farmer, who had been accused of running up power dues, after an electricity department engineer and a police officer allegedly misbehaved with him.

Gulab Singh alias Johnny, 33, a resident of Shimlana village in Saharanpur district, drank poison after Sushil Kumar, a junior engineer of the electricity department, and Jay Prakash Bhaskar, a police sub-inspector, allegedly assaulted him when they visited his house to retrieve the purportedly non-existent dues of Rs 35,000.

The report said villagers had organised a protest and blocked the road between Saharanpur and Deoband for several hours and dispersed only after the police registered an abetment-to-suicide case against the two officers.

Villagers had told reporters on Tuesday that Kumar had three months ago forcibly installed an additional power connection at Johnny’s house although the farmer had repeatedly told him that he already had one. The engineer then allegedly generated a fake bill against the new connection, which Johnny never used.

“The two officers came to Johnny’s house on Monday and slapped him several times when he said the bill was fake,” a villager said.

The villagers alleged that Kumar had forcibly installed additional connections at many homes in the area in order to meet the government’s electrification targets and enhance the power department’s revenue.

The state government recently approved 8 to 10 per cent hikes in power tariff.

Although the Yogi Adityanath government has claimed that the farmers have got the minimum support price for their produce, sugarcane growers in west Uttar Pradesh are said to have run up dues of over Rs 4,000 crore with the mills.

Many farmers in Uttar Pradesh have accused the government of victimising then in the name of loan recovery.