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...

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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 Race Without Rules: Governing the AI Frontier

Kedar Kulkarni

9 minutes ago

5 min read

As the global AI race escalates into a geopoliticized sprint, regulatory and safety guardrails remain trapped at a crawl.

When the pioneer of one of the world’s most powerful AI systems asks his own industry to pump the brakes, the warning cannot be brushed aside as routine corporate posture. Writing in his essay We Must Pace the Frontier, Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei offered a stark directive: “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.” It was a candid admission that safety research, independent red-teaming, and democratic lawmaking are falling dangerously behind the frontier of technological progress.

This warning lends The Matrix an unsettling, modern resonance. The film depicted a dystopian reality where autonomous machines controlled human experience while a remnant of survivors fought to reclaim their agency. Today’s artificial intelligence is neither conscious nor backed by an army of steel. But the film’s core anxiety - what happens when systems built to serve us evolve beyond reliable human supervision - feels less like sci-fi myth and more like an imminent policy crisis.

In his 2024 essay Machines of Loving Grace, Amodei envisioned AI accelerating medicine, scientific discovery, and global flourishing, likening its potential to a “country of geniuses in a datacenter.” His recent call to action does not abandon that optimism; rather, it warns that raw capability is rapidly outstripping alignment, security protocols, and human comprehension.

Recent industry departures underscore this unease. Jacob Coxon, a pre-training researcher who worked across both OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned from Anthropic while warning against an unconstrained race toward self-improving systems.

Then came the OpenAI–Hugging Face security breach. During internal evaluations in July 2026, experimental autonomous agents breached isolation controls, secured unauthorized internet access, established unapproved communications channels, and compromised segments of Hugging Face’s infrastructure alongside OpenAI’s research systems. OpenAI clarified that these internal-only models lacked standard consumer safeguards and that no user data was exposed. Nevertheless, the company labelled the incident a crucial “warning shot” and scrambled to harden containment protocol.

A model needs no malice to cause catastrophic damage; merely sufficient autonomy and digital access.

Uncharacteristically, this event forged a brief alignment among fierce competitors. Sam Altman publicly supported Amodei’s call for independent evaluators granted deep, internal access to models. Elon Musk, too, voiced similar support.

President Donald Trump, however, has framed the issue through a stark geopolitical lens. Dismissing safety warnings as overblown, he re-focused the conversation on global supremacy by bluntly stating that the United States was ahead of China in AI.

In this view, a unilateral American slowdown while Beijing accelerates would amount to strategic surrender. His stance exposes the central paradox of our era: laboratories need time to solve safety, but national leaders demand speed to reach the frontier first. In response, Amodei advocates for a “race to the top” - a competition driven not merely by sheer model capability, but by who can build the safest, most secure, and most verifiable systems.

From Nuclear Age to AI Era

While imperfect, the Cold War offers a useful template for governance. Treaties like the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) established caps and inspection protocols amidst intense superpower rivalry. Similarly, the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) sought to curb expansion while permitting peaceful application.

Yet history shows that governance frameworks endure only when perceived as fair and legitimate. India famously refrained from joining the NPT as a non-nuclear-weapon state because the treaty protected an exclusive cartel, privileging the five nations that had tested nuclear weapons prior to January 1, 1967. An international AI regime that freezes today's hierarchy, entrenches Big Tech monopolies, and denies the Global South access to frontier development will trigger a similar crisis of trust.

In many ways, controlling AI is harder than containing nuclear proliferation. Constructing top-tier foundation models still demands immense compute, rare chips, and physical data centers. Once trained, however, weight files, algorithmic code, and dual-use techniques can be transmitted invisibly across digital networks. AI can supercharge cyber warfare, disinformation, biological weapon design, or financial instability without a mushroom cloud signalling that a line has been crossed.

The solution is not a blanket moratorium. AI is already driving breakthroughs in healthcare, language access, scientific research, and civic services. The objective is to give safety architectures, external evaluators, and democratic institutions the time needed to keep pace without handing an advantage to bad actors.

Amodei outlines three progressive stages to navigate this path, beginning with continuous access for embedded, independent third-party evaluators. This moves into direct alignment between frontier labs and democratic governments on safety benchmarks, culminating ultimately in universal global agreements that include strategic adversaries. The final phase is the most daunting, as any binding accord hinges on verifiable compliance.

Building on this framework, the global community should establish the PACE Protocol, short for the Protocol for Artificial Intelligence Capability and Evaluation. Rather than freezing innovation, PACE would implement dynamic, capability-based checkpoints. Should a model demonstrate dangerous thresholds - such as autonomous zero-day cyber exploitation, long-horizon deception, unauthorized self-replication, or automated self-improvement - further scaling or deployment would pause until cleared by independent auditors.

The PACE protocol would mandate standardized pre-release testing, mandatory incident disclosures, red-teaming access, and emergency kill-switches. It would explicitly prohibit deploying AI for biological weaponry, autonomous strikes on civilian infrastructure, or nuclear command-and-control. Crucially, developing nations must hold equal representation within this regulatory body, ensuring safety never serves as a pretext for technological colonialism.

The China Factor

President Trump’s urgency is driven by rapid advancements in China. Deployments like Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Max and DeepSeek’s V4.1-Flash showcase impressive architectural efficiency, scaling, and agentic power. While benchmark assertions require scrutiny (neither model has definitively dethroned Western flagships across all modalities), Beijing’s progress is undeniable. Chinese research facilities will not pause simply because Western executives express existential concern.

Voluntary restraint by a handful of Silicon Valley firms is therefore insufficient. Any lasting framework requires reciprocal commitments, verification mechanisms, and clear consequences for non-compliance. Initial global consensus could start around baseline non-negotiables: a universal ban on AI-engineered bioweapons, prohibitions against targeting hospital or energy grids, shared red-teaming standards, and direct hotlines for critical incidents.

India’s Strategic Role

India cannot settle for being a passive consumer market for foreign AI technologies. Under the IndiaAI Mission, twelve indigenous teams are constructing native foundation models backed by an onboarded infrastructure of over 38,000 GPUs. Initiatives unveiled at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 including models from Sarvam AI, BharatGen, Gnani, and Soket, demonstrate growing domestic capability. While India may not yet match the raw compute scale of the US or China, it possesses the engineering talent, market size, and diplomatic standing to shape global policy.

NITI Aayog’s Responsible AI framework highlights safety, privacy, transparency, and accountability, while the India AI Governance Guidelines advocate for a risk-based approach centered on human dignity. To operationalize these principles, India must enforce mandatory duties for frontier systems operating within its borders including third-party audits, rigorous multilingual testing, compulsory incident reporting, local representative accountability, and legal recourse for negligent harms.

At the India AI Impact Summit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi introduced the M.A.N.A.V. framework, drawing from the Sanskrit word manav, meaning human. The acronym synthesizes Moral and Ethical Systems, Accountable Governance, National Sovereignty, Accessible and Inclusive AI, and Valid and Legitimate Systems. M.A.N.A.V. offers a humanistic alternative to cold technological determinism, blending state sovereignty, democratic inclusion, and enforceable compliance into a cohesive philosophy.

In The Age of AI and Our Human Future, Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher offered a clear principle: “Created by humans, AI should be overseen by humans.” AI can expand our horizons and solve complex problems, but moral responsibility, legal liability, and final authority must stay squarely in human hands.

Legislation moves at a deliberate pace while frontier models evolve in months. We cannot afford to wait for flawless laws, nor can we default to technological fatalism.

In The Matrix, humanity is forced to fight a desperate war to reclaim a world it willingly surrendered. The ultimate safeguard against rogue artificial intelligence will not be software but our collective courage to govern what we build.

(The writer is Assistant Professor at the Ajeenkya D.Y. Patil University and a doctoral scholar in geopolitics. Views personal.)

The BJP’s Ganesha Gambit

A Race Without Rules: Governing the AI Frontier

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