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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.

Face of Accountability in 1992-1993 Riots

Quaid Najmi
Apr 7
3 min read

Abdul Sattar Suleman Mithaiwala – the soft-spoken yet steely owner of the popular sweetmeat shop and a bakery on Mohammed Ali Road, passed away in the wee hours of Monday.

 

‘Sattarbhai’ – as he was known to all - was 79, and remained a friendly and familiar bearded figure in his tiny office behind the sweetmeat shop where he met visitors, lawyers, journalists and cops.

 

After all, he was one of the most identifiable faces connected with the dual riots that rocked Mumbai – first in Dec. 1992 and then in Jan. 1993 – in the aftermath of the razing of the contentious Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on Dec. 6, 1992 – a painful chapter that is now practically erased from history.

 

Sattarbhai’s entry into the riots case came when a massive tragedy took place in his Suleman Bakery on January 9, 1993 – changing his life forever.

 

Acting on a tip-off of alleged firing from the bakery premises, a police team led by then Joint Commissioner of Police R. D. Tyagi rushed there and surrounded the building. In the stormy operation that followed, at least eight unarmed men, mostly bakery workers living inside the bakery were killed, triggering national outrage.

 

Undaunted by the catastrophe taking place in his own premises, Sattar decided to pursue the case with dogged determination, silent courage and fighting all pressures.

 

The tragedy that defined his life happened during the second phase of the bloody communal riots that ravaged Mumbai after the Babri Mosque was felled.

 

Acting on reports of alleged firing from the bakery premises, a police team led by Tyagi stormed the building. In the operation that followed, eight unarmed men inside the bakery were killed, triggering national outrage.

 

The Suleman Bakery firing catapulted into one of the most high-profile, and controversial incidents of the 1992-1993 riots – though it was not the only one. The reason was the alleged perpetrators were policemen and the victims were ordinary unarmed civilians trapped inside their workplace.

 

At the time when the country’s commercial capital was engulfed in a communal conflagration for weeks, this case raised questions over bias, use of excessive force and willy-nilly state complicity. As Justice B. N. Srikrishna Commission later noted how the police version “did not inspire credence”, making the tragedy a symbol of institutional failure.

 

Public Memory

As Mumbai bore the brunt of the riots with lumpens ruling the streets for weeks, the Suleman Bakery case became a rare one where accountability was directly sought from the police and the government – remaining etched in public memory since then.

 

Coupled with the Radhabai Chawl killings or police firing instances in different parts of the city, doubts were raised in public minds whether the violence was sporadic and spontaneous or was probably enabled and encouraged by those in power, as more than 900 deaths and 2000-plus injuries were recorded. Later, the city was scarred  by the serial blasts on March 12, 1993, with more deaths, destruction and social devastation.

 

Sattarbhai followed up his quest for justice diligently, but over time, it appeared to be fizzling out, 18 cops were booked of whom Tyagi and nine others were discharged in 2003 for lack of evidence, two died during the trial and only four still face the legal proceedings.

 

Even at the age of 75, Sattarbhai came to the court in a wheelchair, but later declared a ‘hostile witness’ as he could not remember certain crucial details of that night. Privately, he became cynical, even admitted to pressures from different quarters, first labelled as a suspect and then even blamed for the bakery incident itself – saying his confidence was shaken.

 

Bakery Carnage

The Suleman Bakery firing occurred at the height of one of Mumbai’s darkest chapters – the bloody riots of December 1992–January 1993 riots - triggered by the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, and left over 900 people dead across the city.

 

After an uneasy lull in December 1992, tensions escalated again in early January 1993 following a series of killings in south Mumbai, including that of a Mathadi worker in Pydhonie, which were given a communal colour.

 

On January 9, police claimed that they got reports of some shady activities in the bakery and a team stormed there, leaving at least eight unarmed workers dead. After a massive furore, tough investigations, and a judicial probe by Justice B. N. Srikrishna Commission, raised haunting questions on the police role, and remained unanswered.

 

Over time, the Suleman Bakery case symbolised a deep communal chasm of that period, the long struggle for accountability in riot-related violence, particularly from the law-enforcers, and Sattarbhai stood as a solitary torchbearer of that valiant effort.

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