Raucous Reverence

The assault of a Pune resident and anti-noise activist vocal about excessive noise during festivals is a disturbing reminder of what happens when religious enthusiasm becomes a licence for civic lawlessness. A disagreement over loudspeakers and DJs should be settled by argument. It should never end with one citizen hitting another.

The attacker has reportedly been arrested and charged with serious offences. But the incident exposes a growing intolerance towards anyone who questions the excesses that have increasingly come to masquerade as religious celebration.

Ganeshotsav is among Pune’s defining traditions. It has a remarkable history as a vehicle for community participation and public culture. Yet parts of the festival have acquired a rather different character. The loudspeaker and the DJ have become instruments not merely of celebration but of competitive volume. The objective appears less to mark devotion than to ensure that nobody within several streets is allowed to ignore it.

That is a particularly unfortunate evolution for a festival associated with Lord Ganesha, the embodiment of wisdom and discernment.

The problem begins when celebration becomes coercive: when one group’s right to enjoy itself is treated as more important than everyone else’s right to sleep, study, work, recover or simply enjoy some peace.

Pune hardly needs additional noise. It is already a city of traffic, construction, commercial activity, honking and relentless urban expansion. Noise pollution today is a major civic problem, and one that becomes especially difficult to escape during festivals when amplified sound can continue across residential neighbourhoods for hours.

Yet raising this issue increasingly requires courage. The language of religious offence is too easily deployed to shut down perfectly legitimate questions about public conduct. Worse, when argument gives way to assault, the message to other citizens is to keep quiet and suffer in silence.

A citizen who objects to excessive noise is demanding a basic enforcement of noise regulations. No festival can confer upon its organisers an ownership of public space or upon its participants an exemption from ordinary standards of behaviour at the cost of inconveniencing other citizens.

The state needs to enforce the law strictly. Rules governing decibel levels, timings and public nuisance should rigorously apply during festivities.

There is also a question for Pune’s festival organisers and devotees. At what point does celebration cease to honour a tradition and begin to damage it? Ganeshotsav should bring a city together, not force its residents into a contest between devotion and basic civic peace. A festival rooted in wisdom should have no difficulty understanding that distinction.

Faith does not become more profound when it becomes louder. It merely becomes harder for everyone else to live with.