Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav on Monday, 13 July 2026, launched a sharp attack on the Uttar Pradesh government's mega tree-plantation drive, calling it a front for electoral fund collection and accusing the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party of staging a performative exercise while filing crores of saplings only on paper.

Context

Posting on X, Akhilesh Yadav mocked the plantation event with characteristic wordplay, saying: 'Lo ab vriksharopan ka hi encounter kar diya!' ('So now they have even staged an encounter of tree-planting!'). He sarcastically noted that at least one tree was planted — on a stage — while the remaining 34,99,99,999 (approximately 35 crore) would exist only in paper files.

He coined the term 'bhrashtaropan' — a portmanteau of bhrashtachar (corruption) and vriksharopan (tree-planting) — to describe what he called a parallel system for channelling electoral funds under the cover of an official green campaign. He also invoked the BJP's 'double engine' slogan, blaming internal friction between the state and central wings of the party as a root cause of the dysfunction.

Policy Backdrop

The Yogi Adityanath government in Uttar Pradesh has conducted annual mega tree-plantation drives since 2017, routinely announcing targets running into hundreds of millions of saplings. These campaigns have drawn repeated scrutiny over the gap between announced targets and independently verified survival rates of planted saplings.

The Samajwadi Party has previously raised similar objections during the 2022 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections, alleging that official plantation programmes were used to build parallel fundraising networks. Yadav's latest post escalates that critique, framing the current drive as a continuation of the same pattern ahead of the 2027 state elections.

Stakeholders and Impact

Akhilesh Yadav also referenced an earlier public statement by a BJP leader described as being 'not in the mood to listen to speeches' — a remark he said had already eroded what little credibility remained, and which this plantation event, in his view, has now finished off entirely. He used the ruling party's own signature imagery, saying those responsible had 'run a bulldozer over their own remaining image.'

The criticism lands at a sensitive moment for the UP BJP. Environmental activists and opposition parties have long demanded audited data on sapling survival from the state's Forest Department. UP voters, particularly in rural constituencies where plantation drives are visible, remain a key audience for both the government's green messaging and the opposition's counter-narrative of corruption.

What's Next

The Uttar Pradesh Forest Department has not yet issued a public response to the figures or allegations cited by Yadav. Any official data release on actual plantation survival rates would directly test the credibility of both the government's claims and the opposition's counter-narrative.

With the 2027 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections drawing closer, governance optics — from bulldozer actions to green drives — are increasingly becoming political battlegrounds. Akhilesh Yadav's sustained use of the BJP's own vocabulary, such as 'double engine' and 'bulldozer,' signals a deliberate strategy to turn the ruling party's brand imagery against it in the months ahead.