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.

Heaps of Garbage Along the Roadsides

Writer: Dr. Sanjay Joshi
Dr. Sanjay Joshi
Oct 12, 2024
2 min read

Updated: Oct 22, 2024

Heaps of Garbage

Friends, in my earlier article last week, I had described the pitiable conditions of cows and the human ragpickers. At this point, may I take this opportunity to express my deep sense of gratitude for those ragpickers?


In fact, these are the people to whom we should always be thankful. Why? Because they are doing a wonderful job for us. Through their act, they are reducing the volume of waste before it is taken away by the garbage trucks to the designated dumping grounds. Reduction in volume is one very crucial and important activity in waste management. But while doing so, just as the cows end up in consuming the plastic bags innocently, unknowingly, these poor ragpickers also are at very high health risks.


First, they do not wear any personal protection like masks, gloves, long boots etc. Why? Simply because they do not have money to buy such things! Secondly, they are unaware of maintaining their own personal hygiene. Due to this, they often fall sick and there are chances that they might carry the germs unknowingly and eventually spread infection in the community leading to epidemic like situations.


However, those poor souls have no choice because collecting saleable articles from the garbage heaps is the only means of earning their daily meals. Now coming to the secondary disposal of these garbage heaps from the streets to some other area designated as the dumping ground or garbage depot. In larger cities, they have created area wise ‘transfer stations’ where such garbage collected from the roadsides is brought by the workers before taking it to the dumping ground. At such transfer stations, this garbage is sorted out into varied materials as per its composition.


This act is essential and important as segregated waste can be easily ‘treated’ and disposed off without causing much harm to the environment. Of course, such transfer stations are not available everywhere. So, at such places, the heaps of garbage collected from different localities in a town or city are directly taken to a dumping ground.


A dump yard or a dumping ground is an open place belonging to an urban local body which is earmarked for collecting and storing the garbage. It is a final destination or abode for thousands of tons of garbage collected from all over the city mostly in unsegregated form. So, such garbage is a mixture of wet or biodegradable waste and dry or non-biodegradable waste.


Now, as the villages become towns and towns become cities which further expand into metropolitan as a result of rapid urbanization, selecting and earmarking a suitable site for a dumping ground becomes very difficult for the local civic authorities and there are multiple social, economical and environmental issues associated with it. I will discuss these issues and possible solutions through my next few articles in this column.


(The writer is an environment specialist. Views personal.)

Comments

bottom of page