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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.

Eyes in the Dark

Correspondent
May 1, 2025
3 min read

The execution of an alleged Mossad operative by Iran underscores the power and peril of Israel’s long tradition of pre-emptive intelligence. 

The Iranian state media recently announced the execution of Mohsen Langarneshin, accused of being a senior Mossad asset. He was hanged, reportedly for helping orchestrate the 2022 assassination of Colonel Hassan Sayyad Khodaei, a senior officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Tehran’s verdict was swift, but the underlying message cuts both ways: Israel’s intelligence arm can reach deep into the heart of its most implacable enemy and Iran knows it.


Langarneshin’s story reads like a chapter from Mossad’s storied playbook. According to Iranian authorities, he was recruited in 2020, met handlers in Georgia and Nepal and provided ‘technical support’ for Khodaei’s killing. He allegedly rented safe houses for other agents across Iran including in Isfahan, near sensitive military and nuclear sites, and was involved in logistical planning for a drone strike on a weapons facility in 2023.


Israel, for its part, neither confirmed nor denied the operation. It rarely does. The results speak for themselves: a steady stream of disrupted plots, neutralized commanders and mysterious explosions. Mossad’s reach into Iran is no recent development, merely the continuation of a shadow war that Israel has mastered over decades.


One of the earliest and most audacious examples was Wolfgang Lotz, a German-born Jew who posed as a former Nazi officer sympathetic to Arab nationalism. Lotz penetrated Egyptian high society in the 1950s, reporting on German scientists working on Cairo’s missile program. His intelligence helped blunt Egyptian advances in rocketry, showing how Israel could undermine its adversaries from within, often without firing a shot.


Then came Eli Cohen, the legendary Mossad agent who infiltrated the highest ranks of the Syrian regime in the 1960s. Under the alias Kamel Amin Thaabet, Cohen dined with generals, toured military installations, and transmitted intelligence that proved critical during the Six-Day War in 1967. His eventual capture and execution by Syria in 1965 turned him into a national hero in Israel and a cautionary tale for the Arab world.


More recently, Mossad has evolved into a high-tech juggernaut. In 2018, agents slipped into a warehouse in Tehran and walked out with a trove of nuclear documents, half a ton of secrets that laid bare Iran’s duplicity over its nuclear program. In 2020, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the father of Iran’s nuclear project, was assassinated near Tehran, reportedly by a satellite-controlled machine gun.


The assassination of Colonel Khodaei in 2022 had followed a similar pattern: sudden, clinical, and humiliating for Iran’s security services. The colonel had reportedly overseen plots to target Israeli civilians and diplomats abroad. Iranian officials had initially described him vaguely as a “defender of the shrine,” referring to his role in the Quds Force, the foreign operations wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). But Khodaei was no ordinary officer. He had reportedly been involved in overseas operations targeting Israeli and Western interests, including attempted attacks on diplomats. Eliminating him in broad daylight at his doorstep was not only a blow to Iran’s capabilities but also a message that Iran’s reach has consequences.


Langarneshin's presence points to a deeper Israeli network operating within Iran. That he was caught only confirms the Mossad’s presence.


For Israel, such operations are not reckless adventurism but part of a doctrine of proactive defence, born of necessity since the creation of the Jewish state in 1948. A nuclear-armed Iran remains the greatest strategic threat to the Jewish state. Intelligence, not diplomacy or deterrence alone, has proven to be the most consistent tool for delaying Iran’s ambitions.


Langarneshin’s execution will no doubt be trumpeted by Tehran as a victory over foreign subversion. But beneath the bluster lies a nervous regime, haunted by what it cannot see and who it cannot trust. Mossad’s long tradition of reaching behind enemy lines - from Damascus to Cairo to Tehran - has not just reshaped the region’s security calculus but forced regimes like Iran’s to turn inward, breeding paranoia and purges.

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