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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.

All in the Family

Writer: Abhijit Joshi
Abhijit Joshi
Jan 2
4 min read

In Maharashtra’s politics where ideology is negotiable and arithmetic reigns supreme, the Pawars are playing the long game.

It would be fair to say that politics in Maharashtra has long ceased to be a contest of ideas. It is akin to a revolving door, where yesterday’s adversaries share breakfast today and plot against one another by dinner. Alliances are stitched together with remarkable speed and unravelled just as quickly, leaving voters struggling to keep track of who stands where or why. If this fluidity has a single emblem, it is the Pawar clan.


For decades Sharad Pawar has been cast as the state’s supreme tactician, a politician who treats ideology as a suggestion rather than a constraint. After 2014, as national politics hardened into a bipolar contest, Maharashtra went in the opposite direction. The familiar categories of friend and foe dissolved. The Congress embraced its ideological foe -the Shiv Sena; the Sena split in two; the Nationalist Congress Party fractured along family lines. What once appeared unthinkable became routine.


Volatile Politics

The 2019 Assembly Election marked the high point of this volatility. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the undivided Shiv Sena, which had fought together, fell out spectacularly after the results. In the chaos that followed, Pawar executed what many still regard as his finest manoeuvre: midwifing the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) - an improbable coalition of the Sena, Congress and NCP. Uddhav Thackeray, a man whose party had spent decades railing against Congress, was installed as Chief Minister. Devendra Fadnavis, the BJP’s rising star, was left stunned.


For two and a half years, Fadnavis appeared to brood on this reversal. Then came his riposte. In 2022 he engineered a split in the Shiv Sena, peeling away Eknath Shinde and a majority of its legislators. Shinde became CM while Fadnavis accepted the post of deputy, though few doubted where real power lay. The counter-stroke was devastating. The MVA collapsed, and in the 2024 assembly election the BJP-led Mahayuti returned with a handsome mandate.


The coup de grâce, at least symbolically, was delivered when Ajit Pawar - Sharad Pawar’s mercurial nephew and long-time heir apparent - crossed over with a chunk of the NCP to join the Mahayuti. It weakened the elder Pawar’s party, stabilised the new government and suggested that even Maharashtra’s most seasoned operator could be wrong-footed. For perhaps the first time in decades, Sharad Pawar looked momentarily unsettled.


Long Duel

Yet to assume that this is a simple story of one strategist outplaying another is to misunderstand Maharashtra’s politics. Many observers argue that Pawar and Fadnavis are engaged in a more subtle, long-term game in which both benefit from the steady erosion of the Shiv Sena, in both its Uddhav Thackeray and Eknath Shinde incarnations. In this telling, urban bodies, cooperatives and financial networks are the real prizes.


It is against this backdrop that the recent decision by the two NCP factions to come together for municipal corporation elections in select cities has caused such a stir. Images of Sharad Pawar and Ajit Pawar sharing a stage again have been read breathlessly as a family reunion. But it is nothing of the sort. This is a coldly calculated tactical arrangement.


Municipal corporations in Maharashtra are not minor prizes. They control budgets that run into thousands of crores and anchor grassroots patronage networks. Winning cities means shaping the political weather long before assembly or parliamentary polls. For Sharad Pawar, cooperating with his nephew at the local level helps prevent Congress and the Uddhav Thackeray-led Sena from entrenching themselves in urban power centres. For Ajit Pawar, it offers a chance to rebuild local legitimacy without surrendering the advantages of office.


Nor would it be the first time Pawar has used tactical alignments to ‘correct’ equations. He has never been squeamish about issue-based understandings with ideological rivals if the arithmetic demands it. The municipal pact is less about healing a family rift than about retaining bargaining power in an increasingly polarised landscape.


Personal relationships add another layer. Pawar’s easy camaraderie with Gautam Adani, India’s most controversial tycoon, has long irritated his allies. When Adani made a conspicuous appearance at Pawar’s birthday celebrations in Delhi that was attended awkwardly by Rahul Gandhi, it sent a message that the wily NCP patriarch does not subscribe to the Congress’s absolutist rhetoric against big business. Days later, Adani’s visit to Baramati, the Pawar family bastion, reinforced the point. The entire clan turned out to welcome him.


Was this a warning to Congress and the Sena, both of which have built political capital attacking Adani? Or merely a reminder that, in Pawar’s worldview, pragmatism trumps posture?


There is also the question of succession. Is the municipal rapprochement a prelude to a fuller reconciliation, with Sharad Pawar eventually handing the reins to his nephew?


The debate has sharpened amid murmurs about Supriya Sule, Pawar’s daughter and MP, whose critics question her ability to command the party organisation in Maharashtra. While Sule remains influential in Delhi, her grip on the state apparatus is less secure.


For Sharad Pawar, the coming urban elections serve multiple ends. They help protect his legacy, keep rivals guessing and ensure that the NCP - split though it may be - remains relevant. For Ajit Pawar, they offer a chance to step out from his uncle’s shadow while still benefiting from his tacit endorsement.


None of this amounts to reconciliation in the sentimental sense. It is politics in its purest, most transactional form. In Maharashtra, permanence is an illusion. Alliances dissolve overnight and rivals rediscover each other by morning. And the Pawars understand this better than most.


(The writer is a political observer. Views personal.)

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