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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.

Jantar Mantar: Reading the Pattern Behind the Protest

Writer: Sachin Udgirkar
Sachin Udgirkar
Jul 27
3 min read

It is worth asking whether the movement remained true to the cause that gave it life.

The NEET protest at Jantar Mantar ended with the resignation of the Union Education Minister, but one question remains: whose playbook was actually being run here?


The shape of what unfolded was not new. It closely tracked a well-documented set of organising tactics — the same ones laid out in Saul Alinsky’s 1971 manual Rules for Radicals, the foundational text for a certain style of activism that has since travelled well beyond America. You did not need to believe in a conspiracy to notice a pattern. You simply had to watch.


Mock, don’t argue: Ridicule your opponent rather than debating him — reasoned argument invites a reasoned response, but humiliation does not. Look at what was produced at the protest site: the slogans, the mimicry, and the social media clips built for laughs rather than for making a case. This was not a movement arguing that the counselling process was broken. It was a movement performing contempt for the people running it. Genuine NEET aspirants, exhausted and anxious about their futures, were unlikely to have found this funny. But their approval was never the objective.


Never let it get boring. A protest that ran too long risked losing its own crowd, so the theme had to keep moving. That was the only honest explanation for how a protest about examination reform arrived at Article 370, LGBTQ rights, and Umar Khalid›s release. These were not organic tangents. They were what happened when a movement›s survival depended on novelty rather than resolution. Ask yourself: how many of these causes had been on anyone›s mind when NEET aspirants first came to Jantar Mantar?


Never fight an institution — fight a person. Institutions were slow, diffuse, and hard to hate. A person was easy. In this instance, that person was the Union Education Minister. Today it was one minister; tomorrow it could be someone else. This was not strategy in service of NEET reform — it was strategy in service of the movement›s own momentum. A minister could be humiliated. A flawed admissions system, slower and more complicated, could not. Guess which one received the attention.


Never offer a solution. This was the tell that mattered most. A movement that wanted reform proposed reform. A movement that wanted to survive avoided it, because a solution, once offered, could be accepted, debated, or rejected — and any of those outcomes ended the protest. No solution meant no closure. No closure allowed the movement to sustain itself, gathering causes as it went.


None of this proves that any organiser had read Alinsky, still less that they were consciously executing his rules. Pattern recognition is not proof, and I am not claiming it is. What I am saying is this: when a protest’s behaviour lined up this closely, and this repeatedly, with a decades-old approach to sustaining movements beyond its founding cause, it ceased to be unreasonable to ask who it was actually for.


Throughout the protest, somewhere outside Jantar Mantar, a NEET aspirant was waiting for a counselling date. They had not asked for Article 370. They had not asked for a minister’s resignation. They had asked for a fair, transparent examination.


The question was never whether people had a right to protest. They did, unconditionally. The question that remains is whether the protest ever lost sight of the cause that gave it life.


(The writer is an IT professional based in Thane. Views personal.)

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