Uttarakhand to restart verification drive of outsiders post-elections, announces Pushkar Dhami

The Uttarakhand Police will resume their verification drive to check the identities of people from other states living in Uttarakhand after the Lok Sabha elections, announced Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami. This drive, initiated in 2022 by Dhami, followed a request from the head of the Shankaracharya Parishad.

Ensuring law and order

Chief Minister Dhami emphasized that the verification drive is not new. "We have conducted this drive before and will do so again with strictness to preserve Uttarakhand's 'mool swaroop' (original features). This is why we enacted laws against conversion and property damage and conducted anti-encroachment drives. These efforts will continue," he said on Monday.

Additional Director General of Police (Law and Order), AP Anshuman, stated that the drive will restart once the Election Commission's model code of conduct is lifted after the results are announced on June 4. Uttarakhand voted in the first phase of the seven-phase Lok Sabha elections on April 19. Anshuman explained that the current priority is managing the Char Dham Yatra. The verification drive involves background checks on people working and settling in the state to maintain law and order. It aims to identify outsiders who might commit crimes and then leave, as well as to catch terrorists.

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Background of the verification drive

The drive was first launched in April 2022 following a letter from Swami Anand Swaroop, head of the Shankaracharya Parishad, urging the Chief Minister to prevent non-Hindus from owning land, building houses, or running businesses in the Char Dham Yatra region. The annual pilgrimage to Char Dham shrines — Gangotri, Yamunotri, Kedarnath, and Badrinath — draws several hundred thousand pilgrims.

Former Uttarakhand Director General of Police (DGP) Ashok Kumar assured that the drive was conducted without bias across the state's 13 districts. He said action would be taken against any suspicious individuals regardless of their religion to maintain peace and harmony. In 2022, the Uttarakhand Police began verifying people from outside the state, requiring them to submit an affidavit with their details and a character certificate from their home district police.

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According to data released by the state government in June last year, police teams checked the identities of 181,000 people, including 65,174 laborers and 57,186 tenants. About 5,000 were classified as suspicious due to incomplete verification of their backgrounds.