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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.

Spies Versus Statesmen: Israel’s Perpetual Struggle with Strategic Restraint

Writer: Shoumojit Banerjee
Shoumojit Banerjee
Sep 14, 2025
5 min read

The recent Israeli airstrike in Qatar exposes historic tensions between the Jewish state’s political leadership and its intelligence agencies.

 

Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (R) with Defence Minister Moshe Dayan during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (R) with Defence Minister Moshe Dayan during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Last week, the Israeli air force launched an audacious missile strike on Hamas leaders in Doha, Qatar with the ostensible goal of decapitating the militant Palestinian group’s leadership. Yet, the operation failed to kill key figures, including Hamas’s chief negotiator Khalil al-Hayya.

 

More than its tactical failure, the strike unravelled the discord within Israel’s security establishment. If reports are to be believed, Mossad, Israel’s external intelligence service, had refused to conduct the ground assassination operation which was ordered directly by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Mossad director David Barnea allegedly feared the move could burn a vital mediation channel with Qatar and endanger negotiations with Hamas leaders over the freeing of Israeli hostages.

 

This clash between Israel’s political leadership and its intelligence establishment is hardly new.


Since its birth in 1948, the Jewish state has been shaped by tensions between the two. Its approach to security has been haunted by a persistent dilemma: when to use force, and when to exercise restraint. Key episodes in the past reveal how these tensions have alternately produced strategic gains, humiliating setbacks and long-term dilemmas.

 

The Lavon Affair

One of the earliest and most instructive cases of this dynamic was the Lavon Affair of the 1950s. In 1954, the Israeli military intelligence apparatus launched ‘Operation Susannah,’ a covert effort to bomb Western cultural targets in Egypt and pin the blame on local nationalists. The objective was to destabilise Nasser’s regime and forestall any rapprochement with the West.

 

Pinhas Lavon, then Defence Minister, authorised the operation without full coordination with Mossad, which was wary of the operation’s risks and legality. The mission backfired spectacularly as several operatives were arrested, leading to a diplomatic scandal that almost derailed Israel’s relations with the United States and Britain. The affair exposed deep fissures between political leaders and the intelligence establishment, leading to Lavon’s resignation and a protracted institutional crisis.

 

Israeli Defence Minister Pinhas Lavon (L) and IDF Chief of the General Staff Moshe Dayan with Shimon Peres (background) in 1953.
Israeli Defence Minister Pinhas Lavon (L) and IDF Chief of the General Staff Moshe Dayan with Shimon Peres (background) in 1953.

Yom Kippur War

Perhaps the most consequential case of the friction between Israel’s political and intelligence establishments occurred during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In the weeks leading up to it, Aman (Israel’s military intelligence) and Mossad repeatedly warned that Egypt and Syria were preparing a coordinated attack. Yet Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defence Minister Moshe Dayan largely dismissed the intelligence as exaggerated or politically motivated.

 

Meir, fearful of appearing alarmist to the international community, especially the United States on whose support Israel heavily relied upon, was reluctant to mobilise the army pre-emptively and provoke diplomatic backlash. Dayan, influenced by a sense of strategic overconfidence in Israel’s qualitative military edge, regarded the warnings as an attempt by the intelligence establishment to push for mobilisation without sufficient proof.

 

An even murkier dimension was added by the Egyptian spy Ashraf Marwan, Gen. Nasser’s son-in-law who became a close aide to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who became one of Mossad’s most prized assets. For years, Marwan (who was given the codename ‘Angel’) provided Israel with intelligence that seemed invaluable like details of Egyptian military deployments, political manoeuvres and strategic intentions. Yet some have argued that his signals were often ambiguous: sometimes accurate, at other times deliberately misleading. While Mossad regarded him as their prime source inside the Egyptian regime, suspicions have lingered since his mysterious death in London in 2007.

 

Some historians, notably Ahron Bregman, have argued that Marwan was in fact a double agent, feeding carefully calibrated disinformation to entrap Israel.

 

Whatever the truth, Israel was caught off-guard when Egypt and Syria launched a coordinated assault across the Suez Canal and the Golan Heights on October 6, 1973. The initial phase of the war saw devastating Israeli losses, shaking the country’s self-image of military invincibility.

 

There was public recrimination between Meir’s government and intelligence officials. Chief of Aman, Eli Zeira and Mossad director Zvi Zamir were criticized heavily in the Agranat Commission, with blame assigned for failing to act decisively on warnings. While Israel’s political leaders essentially blamed the intelligence for the surprise attack, intelligence chiefs argued that political hesitancy had prevented preventive measures.

 

The 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut tragedy highlighted the dangers of Israeli political overreach and limited intelligence supervision. It remains one of the darkest episodes of Israel’s engagement in Lebanon. Following the assassination of Lebanese President-elect Bashir Gemayel, Phalangist militias (Christian Lebanese forces allied with Israel) entered the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, butchering hundreds of civilians.

 

The aftermath of the massacre ignited a significant political and institutional crisis in Israel, revealing deep fractures between the political leadership and the intelligence community. While the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were directly involved in facilitating the Phalangist militia's entry into the camps, the intelligence agencies were implicated in the broader context of oversight and accountability.

 

The Kahan Commission, established to investigate the events, found that Israeli intelligence agencies had prior knowledge of the Phalangists’ intentions and the volatile situation in the camps. However, the Commission concluded that the intelligence community did not adequately communicate the potential risks to political leaders or take proactive measures to prevent the massacre. The aftermath saw political leaders, notably then Israeli Defence Minister Ariel Sharon come under intense public and international criticism.

 

The Commission’s report held Sharon personally responsible for ignoring the danger of bloodshed and revenge, recommending his dismissal. It also recommended the dismissal of Director of Military Intelligence Yehoshua Saguy and the promotion freeze of Division Commander Brig. Gen. Amos Yaron for at least three years.

 

 

Reckless Adventurism

Mossad’s tradition of precision and careful planning was severely tested in 1997 in the attempted assassination of Hamas leader Khaled Mashal in Amman, Jordan. The operation, authorised at the highest political levels by Prime Minister Netanyahu (then serving his first term), was conceived in the belief that eliminating Mashal would decisively weaken Hamas’s leadership at a critical juncture. Mossad agents injected a lethal toxin into Mashal’s ear, only to be caught by Jordanian security forces. The fallout was catastrophic. King Hussein of Jordan demanded Israel publicly disclose the operation’s details and provide the antidote to save Mashal’s life. Under heavy diplomatic pressure, a cornered Israel finally capitulated with the head of Mossad himself flying to Jordan with the antidote that brought back Mashal from his near-death.

 

The Mashal Affair stands as a textbook example when both Israel’s political and intelligence establishments acted with equal recklessness. It reflected a convergence of overambitious political will and flawed operational planning, underpinned by the belief that bold actions could force results.

 

By contrast, the audacious 1981 bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor was an instance where unilateral political resolve, even when intelligence counsel was wary, achieved stunning tactical success. Prime Minister Menachem Begin viewed the reactor as an existential threat, fearing Saddam Hussein would soon possess nuclear weapons aimed at Israel.

 

While Israeli intelligence agencies provided essential technical support and reconnaissance, they harboured significant reservations about Begin’s move to bomb the Iraqi reactor. Nevertheless, Begin made the decision to proceed with little deliberative consultation. Operation Opera saw Israeli jets fly deep into Iraqi airspace and destroy the reactor.

 

Facing existential threats since its birth in 1948, Israel’s leaders and intelligence agencies have constantly been torn between offensive action and strategic restraint. The Qatar strike lays bare the perils of privileging political impatience over measured caution. In Israel’s DNA, the porous boundary between war, espionage and politics makes it an especially fraught affair.

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