top of page

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.

Guns, Not Roses: Revisiting The St.Valentine’s Day Massacre

Writer: Shoumojit Banerjee
Shoumojit Banerjee
Feb 13
3 min read

Among the more ‘interesting’ things to have happened on February 14 was the infamous 1929 gangland massacre in a Chicago garage, where seven men of the ‘Bugs’ Moran gang were allegedly gunned down by Al Capone’s men, posing as policemen.


The crime has since been cemented in American urban lore as the ‘St. Valentine’s Massacre.’ It did more than any other single event to awaken a hitherto passive public to the ferocity of Prohibition-era gangland wars.


It also helped fix the gangster as a central figure in America’s cultural imagination, at a time when newspapers, pulp fiction and the infant sound cinema were all beginning to feed off the same brutal material.


Hollywood had, in fact, responded to the rise of organised crime almost in real time. The early 1930s produced a raw cycle of gangster films which were great showcases for legends like James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Paul Muni and Humphrey Bogart.


Classics like ‘Little Caesar’ (1931) with Robinson as an Al Capone-like gangster, ‘The Public Enemy’ (1931), and the Howard Hawks-directed original version of ‘Scarface’ (1932) – also based on Capone with Paul Muni in a seminal performance - had portrayed bootleggers as violent social climbers, volatile and crudely materialistic, reflecting an America unsettled by economic collapse and the sudden visibility of criminal wealth.


It was in the long interregnum between the raw vitality of the early 1930s gangster films and before the operatic and myth-making rehabilitation of the gangster in the 1970s that cult director Roger Corman released ‘The St. Valentine's Day Massacre’ in 1967.


Known by several memorable sobriquets, Corman, called the ‘The Pope of Pop Cinema’ was known for his shoestring shockers which he helmed with consummate skill and dynamism.


Notable among these were the now-classic, ultra-low-budget horror films of the early 1960s based on Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of macabre like ‘The Pit and the Pendulum,’ ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ and ‘The House of Usher’ - all starring the legendary Vincent Price. These baroque and lurid films established Corman as a director who could conjure atmosphere and ideas far in excess of his budgets.


Corman was given his biggest financial backing yet for ‘The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre,’ and he famously wanted Orson Welles for the part of Al Capone, with the great Jason Robards – one of America’s finest stage actors - cast as Capone’s deadly rival, George ‘Bugs’ Moran.


The studio shot down the proposition, instead miscasting Robards as Capone. The affable and highly talented George Segal, then at his peak, was also wasted as one of the Gusenberg brothers, Moran’s allies.


As a result, Robards hams it up as ‘old Scarface,’ utterly lacking the intimidating ferocity of Rod Steiger’s Al Capone before him, or Robert De Niro’s over-the-top flamboyance in Brian De Palma’s ‘The Untouchables’ (1987).


More than Robards or Segal, it is Ralph Meeker as Moran who does the better acting job. Oh yes, amid the wry commentary and bursts of intense Tommy-gun fire, there is also a walk-on part by a then-unknown Jack Nicholson.


Despite all its flaws, the film quite brilliantly captures Prohibition-era gangland Chicago. Its clipped, semi-documentary style, its refusal to romanticise its characters, and its emphasis on systems rather than psychology make it feel oddly modern. Corman treats organised crime less as melodrama than as a business model, complete with hierarchies, redundancies and ruthless efficiency.


It is Corman who is the real star of the picture, hammering home a distinctly pre-Godfather message about a naïve America in which the power structures of the executive suite and the corporation are eerily similar to those of a mob syndicate.


When people think of American organised crime on screen today, the monumental gangster epics that immediately spring to mind are Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘The Godfather’ trilogy (1972-90) with its operatic grandeur; Sergio Leone’s mournful, autumnal ‘Once Upon a Time in America’ (1984) or Brian De Palma’s flamboyantly excessive and over-the-top ‘Scarface’ remake (1983) and ‘The Untouchables.’ These films have come to define the mythology of American organised crime globally.


Buried somewhere beneath these monuments lies Corman’s ‘The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.’ It lacks their grandeur and emotional pull, but in its bluntness and scepticism it reveals an earlier, harsher truth about the genre: that long before gangsters became tragic anti-heroes, they were simply men with guns, operating in a country only beginning to recognise what unchecked power really looked like.

Comments

bottom of page