top of page

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.

The Battle Beneath the Breakfast Table

Writer: Rahul Gokhale
Rahul Gokhale
Dec 11, 2025
3 min read

The tug-of-war over the leadership change in Karnataka’s Congress government may have quietened for now, but the uneasy calm hardly inspires confidence. The state, after all, has a had long tradition of mid-term political tremors which lends every rumour an unsettling plausibility. The latest spark comes from senior MLA B. K. Hariprasad, whose remark that the so-called ‘November Revolution’ will now be discussed after Makar Sankranti has reignited political speculation. The Congress finds itself mocked once again for its increasingly visible internal disorder.


With only a handful of states under its control – besides Karnataka, the Congress holds Himachal Pradesh and Telangana - the party can ill afford such public squabbling. Its dismal performance in the recent Bihar elections, where it won a mere six seats despite contesting around sixty, has already raised serious questions about its political relevance. In such circumstances, the Karnataka power struggle not only dents the party’s credibility but raises a larger question: why should voters trust a party perpetually consumed by its own feuds?


Root of the Crisis

The current turmoil is the legacy of the Congress high command’s indecision after the 2023 assembly elections. With a clear mandate in hand, the Siddaramaiah vs. D. K. Shivakumar battle for the Chief Minister’s post unfolded almost immediately. The two leaders had jointly campaigned, suppressing their longstanding differences. But their alliance was less a meeting of minds than a tactical truce brokered by the high command for electoral survival. And once victory was secured, with the Congress winning 135 out of the 224 Assembly seats, the race for credit and power became inevitable.


Shivakumar, the party’s master organizer, had accurately predicted the Congress tally months before the election. Siddaramaiah brought experience, a mass base, and the OBC identity that anchored Congress’ caste strategy. Between them lay two competing pathways to revival: Shivakumar’s one was rooted in organisational muscle while Siddaramaiah’s in welfare populism and caste arithmetic. Yet the compromise - Siddaramaiah as CM, Shivakumar as Deputy CM and state chief - was always a band-aid. Whether there was an unwritten promise to rotate the CM’s post remains the mystery that fuels today’s unrest. This vagueness is precisely what has widened the fault lines.


By November, when Siddaramaiah’s government completed two-and-a-half years, the leadership-change conjecture hit its peak. Matters intensified when Siddaramaiah’s son Yathindra publicly suggested Minister Satish Jarkiholi could be his father’s political successor - a remark widely seen as confirmation that something was brewing.


Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, himself from Karnataka, has also found his leadership questioned over his inability to defuse tensions swiftly. Some even floated the improbable idea of Kharge stepping in as Chief Minister, citing his Dalit identity as a political advantage. But age and circumstance make such speculation unlikely.


In a bid to signal unity, Siddaramaiah and Shivakumar recently hosted each other for breakfast, sending out carefully crafted images of harmony. After all, Indian politics has long relied on visual choreography - garlands, shared meals, joint roadshows - to mask subterranean and internecine warfare. But the truce appears fragile. Shivakumar’s recent trip to Delhi despite his claim that it was merely for organizational work, has only deepened the suspicion that the matter is far from settled. Congress is visibly unsure whether elevating a Vokkaliga CM will upset its delicate caste arithmetic.


Internal Turbulence

The Congress’ refusal to settle internal disputes swiftly is baffling. The party’s past is full of warnings: In Assam, Himanta Biswa Sarma walked out after feeling sidelined and eventually became the BJP’s chief ministerial star. In Madhya Pradesh, unresolved tensions between Kamal Nath and Jyotiraditya Scindia cost the Congress its government and crippled the party for years.


In Rajasthan, the running feud between Ashok Gehlot and Sachin Pilot paralysed governance for months and nearly handed the BJP an unearned return. In Punjab, the elevation of Navjot Singh Sidhu over Amarinder Singh triggered a chain reaction that first felled the Congress government and then hollowed out the party’s once-formidable base. Even in Maharashtra, chronic infighting between rival Congress satraps weakened the party to the point where it ceded political space to both the BJP and Sharad Pawar’s rivals


From Rajasthan to Punjab, similar scripts of factional indulgence have ended in strategic self-sabotage. If the Congress does not wish Karnataka to follow the same script, it must act decisively. The BJP watches Congress’ internal rifts more keenly than Congress itself, and Karnataka is no exception. Shivakumar’s recent recital of RSS prayer lines in the assembly—before proclaiming his loyalty to Congress set off alarms illustrating that he cannot be underestimated. The BJP knows his value. Does the Congress?


Complacency today could prove catastrophic in the 2028 Karnataka election. For a party struggling to rediscover its national purpose, losing its most important southern fortress would be nothing short of a strategic calamity. The Congress must choose: resolve the contradiction or watch it explode.

(The writer is a political commentator. Views personal.)

Comments

bottom of page