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By:

Rajendra Pandharpure

15 April 2025 at 7:55:54 pm

The BJP’s Ganesha Gambit

Pune’s Ganeshotsav has become an enormous civic and political stage, and the ruling party has proved adept at occupying it. Pune: The city’s Ganeshotsav is entering its final phase, but the festival has already demonstrated something beyond its extraordinary crowds and familiar spectacle: the extent to which it has become a political stage. This year, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has left a particularly visible imprint on the festivities, using an event that reaches deep into the city’s...

The BJP’s Ganesha Gambit

Pune’s Ganeshotsav has become an enormous civic and political stage, and the ruling party has proved adept at occupying it. Pune: The city’s Ganeshotsav is entering its final phase, but the festival has already demonstrated something beyond its extraordinary crowds and familiar spectacle: the extent to which it has become a political stage. This year, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has left a particularly visible imprint on the festivities, using an event that reaches deep into the city’s neighbourhoods as an opportunity for public outreach. The political appropriation of the festival has not, however, been without a counter-current. Demands were raised for curbs on noise pollution, loudspeakers and the volume of dhol-tasha performances. The argument was not against Ganeshotsav itself, but for moderation - notably, a complete ban on DJ music and limits on the number of dhol and tasha instruments used by performing troupes. Familiar Troubles The festival’s reality has been rather different. Major roads have been occupied by mandaps. Processions celebrating the arrival of Lord Ganesha have unfolded amid punishing noise. DJ music, while subject to restrictions, has continued. Traffic congestion has become a familiar feature of the festival, with the movement of political leaders adding another layer to the city’s already strained roads. The Peth areas have remained crowded deep into the night. The Shrimant Dagdusheth Halwai Ganpati temple has drawn enormous crowds for darshan from the opening day. From the old city to housing societies and neighbourhood mandals, Ganeshotsav touches virtually every part of Pune. For a political party seeking a direct connection with citizens, few occasions offer such a ready-made network of people, institutions and local influencers. The BJP enters this festival with an unusually formidable organisational base. It has two MPs, seven MLAs and more than 100 corporators in Pune. Murlidhar Mohol, one of the city’s MPs, is a Union Minister of State. Chandrakant Patil is a Cabinet minister in the Maharashtra government, while Madhuri Misal is a Minister of State. The party’s presence also extends into the festival’s organisational architecture. Its influence is visible across numerous mandals, large and small. BJP MLA Hemant Rasane is General Secretary of the Shrimant Dagdusheth Halwai Sarvajanik Ganpati Trust. Kunal Tilak, a member of Lokmanya Tilak’s family, is a BJP corporator. The political and cultural histories of Pune therefore intersect in ways that are difficult to ignore. The BJP’s senior leadership has also made the most of the occasion. National President Nitin Nabin visited Pune to seek Lord Ganesha’s blessings, while Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis visited the city before and during the festival. Such visits are about more than religious observance. In a festival watched by millions and embedded in the city’s social life, political visibility comes almost automatically. There is also talk in Pune that the BJP provided substantial financial support to Dhol-Lezim troupes and their organisers, with claims that some major mandals received financial backing as well. These claims would require independent verification, but the perception itself points to the depth of the political contest around Ganeshotsav. BJP workers, according to local observers, have also sought to make their presence more conspicuous than that of festivities organised by housing societies. Useful Expedient The festival arrives at a politically useful moment for the BJP. The party has faced disquiet on several fronts. Young people have been agitated over the paper-leak controversy. Broader public dissatisfaction has been voiced over inflation and unemployment, while government policies relating to ethanol and charges associated with UPI transactions have also generated criticism. While a political party can defend a policy in a press conference and advertise its achievements, during Ganeshotsav, its workers can be physically present in neighbourhoods, among processions, mandals, cultural groups and devotees. Politics thus becomes less about argument and more about visibility. That is the BJP’s advantage in Pune. Ganeshotsav, after all, is not simply a sequence of religious rituals. It is an elaborate civic network involving local organisers, volunteers, cultural groups, businesses, residents and political representatives. Whoever has influence over that network acquires a powerful channel of communication with the city. The BJP appears to understand this particularly well. Its strength in Pune’s electoral politics has been reinforced by a presence that extends beyond elections and into the institutions and social spaces that organise public life. The irony is that the very scale of the festival that makes it politically attractive also magnifies the civic costs. The political value of Ganeshotsav and the civic burden it creates are therefore two sides of the same phenomenon. For Pune, the larger question is not whether politics has entered Ganeshotsav. It has done so for decades. The more consequential question is whether the festival’s extraordinary social capital will remain primarily a vehicle for political outreach or whether the same influence can be used to reconcile celebration with the ordinary civic needs of the city. For the moment, the BJP seems to have understood the first proposition better than most.

A Port in a Storm of Opportunity

Writer: Parashram Patil
Parashram Patil
Mar 9
3 min read

To turn Konkan’s bounty into export muscle, Maharashtra must marry farm output with modern logistics.

The Konkan coast has long been blessed by geography. Its laterite soil and monsoon rhythm yield a rich agricultural basket: rice and ragi, coconut and areca nut, spices and pulses. Above all, it is home to the celebrated Alphonso mango and a robust cashew and fisheries sector. Districts such as Ratnagiri district command brand recognition that many global producers would envy. Yet for decades this natural advantage has collided with the stubborn constraint of logistics.


Agricultural exports from Konkan have traditionally depended on the distant Jawaharlal Nehru Port, nearly 350 km away. For exporters of perishables, that distance has translated into steep transport costs touching Rs. 60,000 per container alongside transit delays. For mangoes, fish and other time-sensitive produce, every hour lost chips away at shelf life and margins. Congestion at the port and seasonal bottlenecks compounds the uncertainty. A region capable of commanding premium prices abroad is forced to pay a logistical tax at home.


Structural Shift

The more fundamental handicap lay in certification. Export markets demand rigorous phytosanitary clearances, food-safety testing and traceability documentation. In the absence of local facilities, farmers and exporters have had to navigate a fragmented chain of inspections and laboratories far from the production belt. Compliance becomes both costly and cumbersome. Small and mid-sized producers, lacking scale, have often found the export route prohibitive.


The commissioning of a Plant Quarantine Office and an NABL-accredited FSSAI laboratory at Jaigad Port marks a structural shift in this equation. By embedding testing, inspection and certification services at the port itself, the state has shortened the distance between farm and foreign market. Exporters across Konkan and western Maharashtra can now complete essential procedures locally, reducing fuel consumption, transit time and procedural friction.


Jaigad’s physical attributes amplify this advantage. The deep-water port, equipped with mechanised handling and expandable capacity, is less vulnerable to the draft constraints that hamper smaller facilities. Its warehousing and cold-storage infrastructure are particularly salient for horticulture and fisheries. More importantly, it sits within reach of hinterland districts of Kolhapur, Satara, Sangli and Solapur, whose output ranges from sugar and spices to poultry and processed foods.


The potential gains are not trivial. Estimates suggest logistics costs could decline by 10–15 percent, enough to sharpen the global competitiveness of flagship products such as Alphonso mangoes and Konkan cashew. India exported roughly 30,000 metric tonnes of mangoes in FY25, with strong demand in the UAE, America and Britain. Ratnagiri’s GI-tagged Alphonso, already synonymous with quality, stands to benefit disproportionately from faster, more reliable shipment.


Integrating People

Infrastructure, however, is only one leg of the transformation. A modern farm-logistics grid must integrate people as well as ports. Women’s cooperatives in mango and cashew processing have the potential to move from subsistence activity to structured enterprise, provided they are equipped with training in packaging standards and food-safety compliance. Embedding such capabilities locally would allow value addition to occur closer to the source, capturing margins that might otherwise leak away.


The region’s youth, too, are poised to play a catalytic role. Export competitiveness today depends as much on digital documentation, cold-chain analytics and traceability systems as on cultivation techniques. Start-ups focused on logistics platforms, inventory management and port-linked services could build a skilled local workforce while reducing reliance on external intermediaries. A logistics grid, in other words, is also a skills grid.


A second infrastructural development strengthens this vision. The recently approved Kolhapur–Vaibhavwadi rail link promises to connect the production belts of Kolhapur, Sangli and Satara directly to the Konkan Railway network. By trimming nearly 200 km of travel to the western ports, the corridor could significantly reduce freight time and cost. For bulk commodities such as sugar, as well as high-value perishables, rail connectivity offers scale and predictability that road transport struggles to match.


Taken together, these measures hint at a more coherent export architecture. Maharashtra already leads India in agri-industrial output. But output alone does not guarantee global market share. In an era of tight margins and exacting standards, competitiveness is forged in cold chains, compliance labs and cargo corridors.


For Konkan, the stakes are regional as much as commercial. A modernised logistics backbone can anchor sustainable growth, reduce post-harvest losses and embed the district more firmly in global value chains. It can also mitigate the historical imbalance between production and market access that has long frustrated local enterprise.


The lesson extends beyond one port or one district. India’s agricultural future will depend less on increasing acreage than on tightening the links between farm and freight.


(The writer is a member of Maharashtra Agriculture Price Commission. Views personal.)

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