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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.

Mumbai Unclogged

Correspondent
Dec 26, 2025
2 min read

For decades, India’s financial capital has run its skies like a high-wire act. Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport, hemmed in by dense urban sprawl, has operated with effectively a single main runway while handling around 950 flights every 24 hours - among the highest traffic intensities anywhere in the world. Delays became routine, expansion appeared impossible, and the costs of congestion were borne quietly by passengers, airlines and the wider economy. That Mumbai, a city that prides itself on scale and ambition, should have muddled through for so long with just one functional airport came to look less like resilience than a planning failure set in concrete.


The opening of the Navi Mumbai International Airport changes that calculus. Few Indian infrastructure projects have been awaited with quite as much impatience and scepticism as the. NMIA. With its inauguration, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) is no longer a one-airport city pretending to be a global hub. By adding fresh capacity and eventually, a second runway, Navi Mumbai promises to provide room to grow.


The need for such airport has long been obvious. Mumbai’s hinterland has shifted eastwards and southwards, with Navi Mumbai, Panvel and Raigad emerging as residential and industrial magnets. India’s aviation market, meanwhile, is expanding faster than almost anywhere else, driven by rising incomes and aggressive low-cost carriers.


That is not to say the new airport arrives fully formed. Early travellers complained of confusing signage, unfinished approach roads and an over-reliance on app-based cabs. For passengers from central Mumbai, the 35-km journey to the NMIA can feel like a test of faith, particularly when public transport links remain skeletal. Such teething troubles are hardly unusual.


Still, the strategic logic is sound. Developed by Adani Airports Holdings in partnership with Maharashtra’s CIDCO, NMIA is among India’s largest greenfield airport projects. When fully built out, it is designed to handle up to 90 million passengers a year, thus placing it among Asia’s bigger hubs. More importantly, it allows Mumbai to think like a two-airport system by redistributing traffic, specialising routes and easing pressure on a dangerously saturated airspace.


There is also symbolism in the details. Aviation professionals have already shortened the airport’s identity to “Navi” in radio calls - a small linguistic shift that signals acceptance.


Sceptics will worry about monopolies, tariffs and the growing footprint of one conglomerate across India’s airports. Those concerns deserve scrutiny. But they should not obscure the broader point that Mumbai’s stagnation in aviation was becoming a drag on India’s economic ambitions. A city that handles finance, film and trade cannot afford to run its gateways at the edge of failure.


Navi Mumbai International Airport is not yet the world-class hub its promoters promise. It may stumble, irritate and disappoint in its early years. But by finally giving Mumbai a second runway it offers the city some desperately needed breathing space, both on the ground and in the skies above. 


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