A sharp political charge landed on Friday, 25 September 2026, when Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami took direct aim at the Congress party's land-administration record, asserting that his government had reclaimed thousands of acres of public land that had been seized by 'mafias' during Congress rule. Posting in Hindi on X, CM Dhami wrote: 'जमीनों की बंदरबांट कांग्रेस के समय में होती थी।' — 'The carving up of land happened during the Congress era. Our government has freed thousands of acres of land here from encroachment, land that mafias had occupied during the Congress period.'

The land-encroachment battleground in Uttarakhand

Uttarakhand, carved out of Uttar Pradesh in 2000, has faced persistent pressure on public land ever since — driven by real-estate demand around hill stations, rapid expansion in the Haridwar-Dehradun corridor, and the unregulated growth around pilgrimage routes. Anti-encroachment drives have been a recurring feature of state governance for more than two decades, conducted by both BJP and Congress administrations at different points. Dhami's framing is pointed: it is not merely that his government has acted, but that the scale of the problem was created under his opponents. The reference to 'mafias' — a loaded term in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand political vocabulary — is designed to conjure organised, politically protected illegal occupation rather than informal settlement.

BJP's anti-encroachment message as a governance signature

Across BJP-governed states, the anti-encroachment narrative has become a consistent pillar of administrative messaging: bulldozer actions, land-recovery figures, and before-and-after comparisons of recovered tracts are used to signal executive will and contrast with perceived permissiveness under rival governments. Dhami, who has led the state since 2021 and secured a second consecutive term for the BJP in the 2022 assembly elections, has positioned administrative cleanup — including anti-encroachment operations — as a defining feature of his tenure. The Indian National Congress, which has alternated in power with the BJP in the state, has not been without its own governance claims. Whether the specific figures Dhami alludes to can be independently verified from official data releases remains an open question — the exact acreage recovered and the direct attribution of encroachments to any single political era are assertions that would require official land-records disclosure to substantiate fully. What is not in question is the political electricity of the charge: in a state where land is scarce, contested, and deeply personal, accusing an opponent of enabling its theft is among the sharpest attacks a sitting chief minister can deploy.