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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.

Rahul Gandhi flays Rs 16-lakh-crore banks’ loans write-off

Quaid Najmi
Jan 27, 2025
3 min read

Updated: Jan 29, 2025

Rahul Gandhi

Mumbai: Congress’ Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi slammed the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Central government for the staggering Rs. 16-lakh-crore write-off by various national, private and urban cooperative banks, on Monday.


Speaking at a ‘Save Constitution Rally’ held in Mhow, Madhya Pradesh, Rahul Gandhi accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of waiving off the massive amounts borrowed by big industrialists, “but did not write off the debts of poor farmers, labourers and students”.


The reference was to a report in ‘The Perfect Voice’ (“Banks recover crumbs from bad loans” - JAN. 23) highlighting RTI revelations on how Indian banks had written off over Rs. 16.61 lakh-crore of non-performing assets, while the recovery process was a measly 1.6 percent per annum of this amount.


“You work and toil, you pay the GST, but Chinese goods are sold in India courtesy big corporates here. The youth in China get jobs. Adani-Ambani get the profits while your children are deprived of employment opportunities,” thundered Rahul Gandhi.


He contended that “the peoples’ money is siphoned off from their pockets and lands into the coffers of Adani-Ambani”, raising questions ahead of the Budget Session of Parliament starting this week.


A RTI query by Pune-based businessman Prafful Sarda elicited shocking details of the loans written off by different banks, amounting to a whopping total Rs. 16,61,290-crore (NPAs) from various defaulters for 10 years.

These include around: Rs 12,08,621 crore (Public Sector Banks - PSBs); Rs 4,46,649 crore (Private banks); and Rs 6,020 crore (Urban Cooperative Banks - UCBs).


This was for a period of almost 10 years, from 2014-2015 till Sep. 2024, as per the RTI response to Sarda from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI)’s CPIO Nengneikim Guite.


Accordingly, the actual recovery notched for the last nearly 10 years was crumbs - just Rs 2,68,795 crore – comprising, Rs 2,16,547 crore (of PSBs); Rs 52,248 crore (of Private); though the figures of UCBs is not provided - leaving a huge pile of Rs. 13,92,495 crore, pending recovery.


“From the NPAs written-off (Rs. 16,61,290 crore), the recoveries amounted to an annual average of Rs 21,654 crore (PSBs); and Rs 522 crore (Private), working out to barely 16.17 percent for the last around 10 years. This gives an approximate annual average of a measly 1.6 percent recovery,” Sarda pointed out.


Quoting the RBI’s RTI reply, he added that a major chunk of the write-offs is due to ‘technical/prudential/Advances Under Collection’, but “the banks retain the right to recover from the borrowers in all such cases”.


“The government’s contention is that such write-offs are ‘purely balance sheet management’ strategy. Hence, the borrower’s liability to ‘repay’, or the bank’s right to ‘recover’ is not diminished in any manner. There are specialized teams which follow-up for the recovery processes thereafter,” said Sarda.


As per a 30-year-old policy of the government, all credit-related matters are deregulated with the concerned Banks and their respective Board of Directors, who decide about the loan amount and recovery policy.


“In this scenario, will the Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announce stricter norms to pin the accountability on the lenders, right from the managers to the Board of Directors - and in case of NPAs - recover the lost amounts from the banks’ own executives for their lapses and poor judgement,” demanded Sarda.


Sarda and banking activists urge the new RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra to suggest measures under the banking laws to make the top directors, officials and/or external forces who pressurize the banks responsible, liable and punishable within a reasonable time-frame.


They aver that this could help prevent defaulters like Nirav Modi, Mehul Choksi, Lalit Modi, Vijay Mallya plus many more who brazenly dupe banks of public money and sneak out of India with political patronage to enjoy their ill-gotten wealth, in future.

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