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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.

Platform Politics

Correspondent
Aug 6
2 min read

Meta’s apology to the Government of India revives the uncomfortable question of who really controls the flow of political information in today’s turbulent times, the voter or the platform?


When the world’s largest social media company admits that it wrongly restricted Prime Minister Modi’s post during a volatile moment in Indian democracy, the issue extends far beyond a single moderation error. Meta’s chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, apologised to Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw for restricting the PM’s post, attributing the incident to an ‘operational’ mistake. That explanation does not answer the larger concerns surrounding Meta’s role in shaping political narratives in India.


Technology companies insist that they are neutral conduits. But experience suggests otherwise. Their algorithms decide what millions see, what remains invisible and what goes viral. As was evinced in protests in Nepal and Bangladesh, those decisions have influenced public opinion profoundly as any political campaign.


These questions are particularly serious given the allegations surrounding the campaign mounted by the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), which spearheaded the protests over the NEET paper leak. The degeneration of the protests has raised strong suspicions that the protests were hardly organic but receiving paid amplification on social media.


Public opinion in a democracy should be shaped by genuine public sentiment and not by opaque algorithms operating inside corporate headquarters thousands of kilometres away. 


This is not simply about Narendra Modi or the BJP. It is about India’s sovereignty over its own democratic conversation. Elections, protests and political debates must be decided by Indians, not by Western recommendation engines whose workings remain secret and whose executives answer primarily to shareholders in California.


If Meta has nothing to hide, it should voluntarily disclose whether content relating to the CJP protests received preferential treatment, whether any exceptional amplification occurred, who authorised it and under what policies. Transparency, and not carefully worded apologies, is the only credible response.


No democracy can permit foreign technology companies to become unelected arbiters of its political discourse. When they amplify selectively, they risk manufacturing political momentum that appears organic but may not be. The concern is not confined to one company. 


Increasingly, global technology corporations possess powers once reserved for states. They curate information, moderate speech, recommend narratives and determine digital visibility for billions. Yet they operate with limited public accountability. That imbalance between influence and responsibility is becoming one of the defining democratic challenges of the digital age. If Meta can inadvertently silence the elected Indian Prime Minister, we are entitled to ask what else its invisible systems may have amplified, buried or shaped without their knowledge.

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