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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.

Alpine Promises

Correspondent
Jan 22
2 min read

There is something faintly theatrical about Indian Chief Ministers flying to Davos to sign memoranda of understanding, as if Switzerland’s thin air confers a special aura of credibility. On the opening day of the World Economic Forum, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said his government had signed 19 MoUs worth a heady Rs. 14.5 lakh crore, promising 15 lakh jobs across sectors ranging from green energy to quantum computing. The numbers are grand.


Yet back home, the contrast is harder to ignore. Mumbai, the state’s economic engine and supposed gateway for foreign investment, groans under collapsing roads, unreliable suburban trains, flooding every monsoon and a skyline punctured by unfinished projects. Against this backdrop, it is fair to ask whether the spectacle of Davos offers diminishing returns and whether the money spent on delegations, pavilions and Alpine networking might be better deployed fixing the infrastructure that ordinary citizens actually use.


MoUs, after all, are expressions of intent, often vague, sometimes recycled. Maharashtra has long been a champion of the Davos numbers game, routinely topping investment-tally charts each January. Yet the conversion rate, the proportion of promised investment that actually materialises, remains stubbornly opaque. Governments announce cumulative figures with pride but they are less eager to publish audited follow-ups showing how many factories were built, how many jobs proved permanent, and how many projects quietly withered once the headlines faded.


This year’s announcements follow a familiar pattern. Data centres, renewable energy, logistics and real estate dominate the list. Lodha Developers’ additional Rs. 1 lakh crore commitment to a data centre park was presented as a marquee achievement, even though the company had already signed a Rs. 30,000 crore MoU months earlier under an existing state policy. If such deals hinge on foreign partners, why must they be sanctified at Davos at all?


The government’s defence is that global investors are present at the WEF and Maharashtra accounts for 39% of India’s FDI. All this is true up to a point. Maharashtra’s size, talent pool and financial depth would anyway attract capital with or without snow-capped mountains. What investors also notice, though, are bottlenecks in form of creaking infrastructure and the urban governance that struggles to keep pace with growth. These are not problems that can be solved by signing ceremonies abroad.


Consider Mumbai’s infrastructure backlog. Roads are dug up with ritual regularity and restored poorly. The suburban rail network, lifeline to millions, remains dangerously overcrowded despite years of promises. Drainage upgrades lag behind climate reality, ensuring annual floods. A city that works is the best investment pitch any Chief Minister can make.


There is also a political economy to Davos theatrics. MoUs create an aura of momentum, useful in domestic politics and investor optics alike. But they can distract from the harder, less glamorous work of execution.


This is not to argue that Maharashtra should shun foreign investors or global forums. But engagement should be a means, not an end.


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