Fact Check: Salman Khurshid makes false claim on demolition drive under Yogi Adityanath

New Delhi, Jun 08: Strong Chief Ministers are these days being identified with bulldozers. A trend has set in where demolition drives are carried out on properties belonging to criminals.

The concept was popularised by Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, Yogi Adityanath when homes and shops of those accused of crimes were demolished. Amidst this Congress leader Salman Khurshid decided to call out the UP government with a tweet that read, 'not Ukraine, these are photographs of Unnao and Farrukhabad of Buldozerland.' He also shared images of bulldozers demolishing buildings.

Several Congress leaders like Alka Lamba retweeted the same. Others too retweeted the photos and some criticised them while others praised the action.

OneIndia did a reverse image search to find that these images were not shot during the Yogi Adityanath regime. Three of the four images shared are in fact from the Akhilesh Yadav regime. The report was carried in Amar Ujala on May 27 2016 when Akhilesh Yadav was the chief minister off UP. Yogi Adityanath came to power in September 2017.

As per the Amar Ujala report, these images were from a demolition drive in Loha Mandi and Bartan Bazar located near Unnao. The administration had demolished around 85 illegal buildings in the area.

However we were not able to find the source of the fourth image. We will update you once we are able to trace the source of the same.

Hence it becomes clear that the tweet by Khurshid claiming that the demolition drive is being undertaken under Yogi Adityanath is false. The three images from the drive are from the Akhilesh Yadav era.