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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.

Gods, Crowds and Courts

Correspondent
Jun 5, 2025
3 min read

The Uttar Pradesh government’s takeover of Shri Bankey Bihari Mandir raises the urgent question whether Hindus can manage their temples without the intervention of courts and the state?

Uttar Pradesh
Uttar Pradesh

Last month, the Uttar Pradesh government formally assumed control of Shri Bankey Bihari Mandir through a new ordinance. It was the culmination of a long legal saga and a response to a tragedy.


The Shri Bankey Bihari Ji Mandir Nyas Adhiniyam, 2025, came just ten days after the Supreme Court issued a landmark verdict allowing the state to acquire land for developing the temple’s surroundings but only if the land remained in the name of the temple’s deity, not the government. The ordinance creates a trust board to manage the temple, composed of bureaucrats, scholars and two representatives from the traditional Goswami families who have overseen the temple’s rituals for generations.


The legal and constitutional stakes are significant. Under Articles 25 and 26 of India’s Constitution, religious groups have the right to manage their own affairs. But Article 25(2) allows the state to regulate these rights in the interest of public order, morality or health. That is precisely the clause the Supreme Court invoked when it ruled that the state could step in to fix what had become a dangerously mismanaged religious institution. In this case, the trigger was a deadly stampede in 2022 during Janmashtami celebrations that killed devotees and injured many more. The temple had become an overcrowded hazard with no emergency exits, poor crowd control and inadequate infrastructure to handle the more than 5 lakh pilgrims who descend during festivals.


The tragedy had prompted a Public Interest Litigation in the Allahabad High Court, highlighting the failure of existing management systems and calling for urgent safety measures. The state responded with a plan to acquire 5 acres of land around the temple to develop restrooms, parking lots, security infrastructure and wider access roads to the tune of over Rs. 700 crore. Initially, the government proposed to use Rs. 300 crore from the temple’s own corpus to fund land acquisition, but the High Court refused, wary of inflaming ongoing disputes between the Goswami lineages over control of the temple’s finances. The Supreme Court eventually allowed it, as long as the land remained under the temple’s name.


The Supreme Court’s intervention was shaped not just by the crisis at Bankey Bihari but by a broader malaise of temple mismanagement, notably in the case of Mathura. Nearly 200 temples are currently caught in litigation, many overseen by court-appointed lawyers who have converted spiritual stewardship into permanent sinecures. The SC derided this phenomenon as ‘Receiver Raj’ and demanded an audit of all such arrangements.


Opponents of state intervention argue that the move infringes on Hindu autonomy. But the facts speak for themselves. The temple had been under the control of a Civil Judge since 2016, with little improvement. Rituals remained sacrosanct, but basic safety, sanitation and crowd control were ignored. A spiritual centre attracting lakhs was run like a rural shrine. The Goswamis, hereditary priests entrusted with sacred duties, lacked both the capacity and the infrastructure to manage a modern religious complex. Their spiritual authority did not translate into civic competence.


When temple governance fails to prevent stampedes or provide clean facilities, the state has a constitutional obligation to act. As the SC judgment noted, what applies to stadiums and hospitals must apply to temples too, especially those that serve millions.


The takeover also reframes a larger dilemma as to who should steward dharma in public life? While Hindus argue for the right to manage their temples, that right comes with legal, ethical and spiritual obligations. When those are shirked, the vacuum invites state control.


One possible way forward is to establish an independent Civil Temple Management Board which would be a professional, accountable body distinct from both traditional custodians and the government. Such a model would also reduce the risk of state overreach while ensuring that temples are run with the seriousness and safety expected of any large public institution.


The saga of Shri Bankey Bihari Mandir is about rethinking how India, while respecting faith, must modernise the management of its religious heritage.

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