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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.

Bondi Blindness

Correspondent
Dec 15, 2025
2 min read

The Bondi Beach shooting in Sydney, Australia where fifteen people were killed at a Hanukkah gathering by a father and son later linked to Islamic State should have left no room for ambiguity. It an act of Islamist terrorism, not a policy puzzle. The facts were as plain as can be. Yet, Australia’s response, like that of much of the liberal West to similar attacks, immediately drifted towards safer abstractions and away from the ideology that drove the violence.


Instead of addressing the elephant in room that is Islamic fundamentalism, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s call for “tougher gun laws” was yet another classic instance of intellectual evasion.


This evasion has now become systemic. Even after the 9/11 attacks, instead of learning any hard lessons, jihadist violence across the Western ‘liberal’ world is endlessly contextualised, softened and relativised. Antisemitism is reclassified as grievance. Islamism is dissolved into sociology. Naming the ideology behind attacks is treated as impolite, and even dangerous. Liberalism, anxious not to offend the ‘religion of peace,’ has trained itself not to see.


Small wonder that media reports in such countries contort themselves to avoid even stating the perpetrator’s religion.


That moral timidity has had consequences. After October 7, 2023, Hamas’s massacre of Israeli civilians should have ended all pretence. Instead, large parts of the liberal commentariat rushed to explain, excuse or even celebrate it. Hamas was rebranded as ‘resistance’ against ‘fascist Zionism’ while antisemitic chants were waved through as political expression.


The same blindness governs the West’s indulgent treatment of Pakistan. India’s Foreign Minister S. Jaishanker once remarked that Pakistan’s GDP is measured by its exports of terrorism. Western liberals objected to the phrasing while ignoring the substance. From Mumbai in 2008 to a long trail of attacks and plots since, Pakistan’s entanglement with militant groups is one of the least disputed facts in contemporary security analysis. Yet Western capitals continue to court Islamabad when convenience demands it, lowering moral standards to fit strategic need. Even leaders otherwise hostile to liberal pieties have played along.


At the same time, a crude false equivalence is imposed on India. Hinduism, a civilisational faith without a history of global violent proselytization, is routinely yoked to Islamist extremism. Narendra Modi is denounced as a ‘fascist’ with mechanical certainty, while jihadist movements are discussed in the language of context and care. This is not moral symmetry but intellectual fraud.


The post-Bondi debate has already descended into irrelevancies. Was the younger attacker Australian-born? Did the father arrive decades ago on a student visa? Did welfare payments play a role? These questions are distractions. Citizenship is not a vaccine against extremism. Integration is not a bureaucratic status but a moral contract, one that the liberal West has been reluctant to enforce. And each time such ‘liberal’ societies downgrade ideology and avert their gaze, they ensure that the next lesson will be delivered the same violent way as the last. 


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