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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.

Pedigreed Hypocrisy

Correspondent
Sep 2, 2025
2 min read

South Mumbai likes to imagine itself as the custodian of Mumbai’s heritage. Its colonial facades, art deco apartment blocks and seafront promenades are presented as the city’s irreplaceable crown jewels. Yet, each time a new project is proposed, residents of these gilded enclaves discover reasons to resist. For them, development is fine so long as it is built in someone else’s backyard.


The latest tantrum concerns a jetty at Colaba. The Supreme Court has dismissed a petition against the project. South Mumbai Residents, banding together under the banner ‘Shift Jetty, Save Colaba’ had been staging protests by invoking marine ecology and heritage preservation.


The State government has long argued that the facility was a crying need for 25 years as the existing jetties near the Gateway of India are inadequate to handle commuter traffic. Passengers must often hop precariously from one vessel to another in choppy waters, risking accidents. Chief Justice Gavai, while dismissing the petition, observed that the issue could not be seen only from the perspective of nearby residents.


This hypocrisy on part of South Mumbai’s elite is hardly new. South Mumbai residents enjoy the best schools, the plushest clubs and property values that rise inexorably. Their children grow up with every urban advantage that collective investment has conferred. Yet they behave as if civic development were a zero-sum game: every metro pillar, jetty or station that comes up in their vicinity is deemed an intolerable intrusion. The price of their obstinacy is paid by millions of ordinary commuters who endure suffocating trains, collapsing bridges and endless traffic jams so that a few can preserve their sea-facing tranquillity.


London has dug metro lines under Georgian squares; Paris has bored tunnels beneath Haussmann boulevards; New York has extended subways under century-old brownstones. Yet South Mumbai residents invoke ‘fragile heritage’ as if colonial facades must forever be treated as holy relics. At the same time, slum-dwellers elsewhere are told to accept displacement as the unavoidable price of progress. The irony is that South Mumbai’s own exclusivity was built on collective infrastructure. The old docks, railways and business districts that created its wealth were public projects. Today, when the State proposes to extend the same principle to water transport or mass transit, the beneficiaries cry foul. Their protests are dressed in the garb of environmentalism and heritage protection, but the real motive is to freeze their neighbourhood in amber while the rest of Mumbai sweats and heaves.


To block change on principle is to turn Mumbai into a museum curated by elites who want modernity without the inconvenience of sharing it. Mumbai is a city of toil, powered by millions who pour in daily from the suburbs. They are compelled to endure the city’s infrastructural chaos so that South Mumbai residents can sip cocktails in colonial clubs while railing against a jetty that might save lives. This is pedigreed hypocrisy and Mumbai can no longer afford it.


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