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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.

Merit’s Mask: How India’s Civil Service Sidelines Social Justice

Writer: Santosh Rasve 
Santosh Rasve 
May 1, 2025
4 min read

Merit’s Mask: How India’s Civil Service Sidelines Social Justice

The UPSC stands at a perilous crossroads as backlogs, lateral entry and interview bias threaten its founding promise of equal opportunity.

Every summer, India’s media hails the toppers of the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) Civil Services Examination with near-religious fervour. This year was no different. Names, photographs and caste affiliations of high-ranking candidates from marginalised communities were circulated with pride, as if the triumph of a few could mask the quiet erosion of systemic safeguards meant for many. But behind the confetti lies a grimmer story of backlogged reservations, stealthy lateral entries and an interview system that rewards polish over potential. India’s civil services, far from being the great leveller envisioned in the Constitution, are becoming a fortress of privilege.


Central to this problem is the crumbling edifice of reservations for Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST) and Other Backward Classes (OBCs). Although the Constitution mandates quotas of 15 percentage, 7.5 percentage and 27 percentage for SCs, STs, and OBCs respectively in government employment, actual representation is slipping. The reasons are not accidental; they are structural, bureaucratic and increasingly political.


Consider first the vanishing opportunities. According to scholars Christophe Jaffrelot and Kalaiyarasan, the number of candidates shortlisted by UPSC dropped from 1,236 in 2014 to just 759 in 2018 (a fall of nearly 40 percent). This decline came at a time when central government vacancies rose, from 550,000 in 2006 to 750,000 in 2014. There are no reliable figures since, but the absence of data is itself telling. Even as the number of posts grows, reserved posts remain unfilled. The number of central government employees declined from 32.7 lakh in 2003 to 26.3 lakh in 2012. The number of SC employees dropped 16 percent despite the rising share of their mandated representation.


The root of this attrition lies partly in what is absent - recruitment - but also in what has been added: lateral entry. Marketed as a way to infuse technocratic expertise into sclerotic bureaucracy, the scheme has instead become a backdoor that circumvents reservation entirely. In 2019, 89 individuals were shortlisted for 10 Joint Secretary-level posts, none of them subject to reservation. By 2024, the government expanded the programme to 45 key positions - 10 Joint Secretaries and 35 Directors or Deputy Secretaries. Not only does the government refuse to collect caste-based data on these hires, but a significant majority - 35 of 63 lateral entrants to date - have come from the private sector, where the composition overwhelmingly favours upper castes.


This dilution of affirmative action is most evident at the top. As per data compiled by IRS officer and author Nethra Pal, SC, ST, and OBC officers comprise just 4.39 percentage of Secretaries in the central government. STs and OBCs have zero representation at this level. General category officers make up a staggering 95.5 percentage. Even at the Director level, where the mandated quota adds up to 49.5 percentage, actual representation remains in the low teens. Of the 928 officers above this level, only 120 (or 13 percent) are SC or ST, far short of the 208 mandated under policy.


This sharp decline in representation as one climbs the bureaucratic ladder raises uncomfortable questions. One answer may lie in the deeply flawed selection process itself, particularly the interview or Personality Test conducted by UPSC. According to Pal’s decade-long study of 10,678 candidates between 2007 and 2017, the average marks gap between General and reserved category candidates was minimal, roughly two to five percent overall. In written tests, the gap narrows further, with SC and ST candidates scoring almost on par with their General counterparts. Yet during interviews, these same candidates are systematically marked down.


This pattern is more than anecdotal. In the top 100 SC candidates studied, only one scored more than 200 out of 300 marks in the Personality Test, despite strong performance in the written exam. Allegations of caste-based discrimination have emerged repeatedly. In 2021, Delhi’s Social Welfare Minister Rajendra Pal Gautam wrote to the UPSC Chairman urging anonymised interviews, citing complaints from SC/ST candidates. He suggested randomly mixing candidates instead of grouping them by reservation status. The UPSC has yet to act.


In 2023, the All-India OBC Students Association pointed to systemic evasion of quotas, especially through the now-routine practice of declaring reserved candidates ‘not found suitable’ to justify not filling vacancies.


The Indian state appears to be increasingly relying on informal mechanisms - lateral entry, opaque interviews and selective appointments - to tilt the scales back in favour of entrenched elites.


This is not a call to abandon merit but to reimagine it. If merit is defined solely by the social capital of English fluency, urbane manners or elite education - often concentrated in the upper castes - then the system is not neutral; it is rigged. True meritocracy in a deeply unequal society demands recognising and correcting for structural disadvantages, not reinforcing them.


India needs a comprehensive law to clear reservation backlogs, a freeze on lateral appointments without proportional representation, and above all, transparency in interviews. Publish caste-wise interview scores. Anonymize identities. Restore faith in a system that is meant to serve all, not just the privileged few.


Otherwise, merit will remain a mask worn by those already ahead, while the rest keep running with their shoelaces tied.


(The writer has completed his Masters in Public Policy and Governance from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Views personal.)

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