Opinion | Team 60: Yogi Plays A Sixer Off Akhilesh's Yorker

Updated: May 11, 2026 13:53 pm IST Published On May 11, 2026 13:47 pm IST Last Updated On May 11, 2026 13:53 pm IST

Published On May 11, 2026 13:47 pm IST

Last Updated On May 11, 2026 13:53 pm IST

In Uttar Pradesh, politics doesn't so much change direction as it changes gear - and usually without signaling first.

The Yogi Adityanath government has done what cornered coalitions always do when the calendar tightens: it expanded the cabinet. Six new ministers. Two promotions. All of it packaged so neatly it could pass for routine administration - if you didn't know that in UP, "routine" is just the word politics uses after the steering wheel has already turned.

They're calling it Team 60, as if a state government were a sports franchise, as if Lucknow were a dressing room and the 2027 assembly elections a championship to be won through composition as much as charisma. Earlier, there were 54 ministers. Now, with barely nine months left before assembly polls in 2027, the expanded cabinet carries the unmistakable air of a backfoot drive - played not against the opposition's bat so much as against the story forming around Yogi's own rule.

Akhilesh Yadav's formidable PDA challenge

Akhilesh Yadav hasn't merely challenged Yogi's record. He's challenged the moral arithmetic of caste itself.

In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, Akhilesh won 37 of UP's 80 seats by running on a single, magnetic idea: PDA - Pichhda, Dalit, Alpasankhyak (Backward, Dalit, Minority). Three letters that function less like a slogan than a mirror, inviting voters to see themselves reflected in a potential government. The BJP's tally in Uttar Pradesh nosedived from 62 seats in 2019 to 33 in 2024. The PDA pitch had drawn blood.

So Yogi's Team 60 arrives looking like a deliberate counter-move. If PDA is Akhilesh's Yorker - delivered low, tight, aimed at the body - then the BJP's cabinet reshuffle is an attempt to re-position the bat before the next........

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