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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.

The Blunder of the Past

Writer: Priya Samant
Priya Samant
Sep 27, 2025
3 min read

For two decades, Bagram symbolised U.S. might—until it became a monument to surrender.

Approximately 40-50 km from the capital of Afghanistan, in the shadow of the Hindu Kush, lies one of the world’s largest air bases, Bagram. Built in the 1950s by the Soviet Union to strengthen its communist roots in Central Asia, Bagram was captured later and expanded by Americans in the hunt for Osama bin Laden and to dismantle Al Qaeda.


From 2001 to 2021, for over two decades, Bagram served as a command centre for U.S. and NATO troops, housing a large arsenal and heavy aircraft. It witnessed a stark demonstration of how a trained, well-equipped military could not counter the guerrilla tactics of the Taliban. It saw the militants celebrating the very weapons the deserters had left behind. Bagram unmasked the torch-bearer of human rights as they turned their backs on the Afghan people, abandoning the counterterrorism commitment they professed to uphold for so long. The base is a symbol of surrender, a history that America is now seeking to rewrite.


In July 2021, just a month before the fall of the US-backed Afghan regime, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) had identified a new Chinese missile base in the Xinjiang region across the Afghan border. The FAS report claimed that nearly 250 nuclear missile silos are under construction in China, which is more than half of the size of the entire U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile strength. Bagram air base is one hour away from China’s nuclear base.


Trump realised the biggest blunder of the past: the abandonment of Bagram Air Base, their strategic military asset in Central Asia. Now he wants Bagram back. “We gave it away for nothing,” he says, blaming Biden for the misstep. However, it was Trump who signed the poorly negotiated Doha Agreement, which Biden did not renegotiate. But how could a real estate mogul-turned-politician miss the politics of place? Despite all this, Bagram is called “Biden’s failure” and Trump’s promise to Make America Proud Again. For debt-ridden Europe, reclaiming Bagram means another burden of being a U.S. ally.


“Bad things are going to happen” is another threat by Trump to make the enemy foresee the worst and rush to the negotiating table. “They need things from us. “We want that base back,” he asserted. The Taliban seeks recognition to lift economic sanctions, unfreeze $9.5 billion in assets, and secure international aid for the rebuilding efforts. Meanwhile, by blocking India’s access to Iran’s Chabahar port, Trump has not just hampered India’s trade, but he has also choked off essential supplies to Afghanistan, too. The United States clearly gained leverage over the Taliban. However, reclaiming the base once lost is no cakewalk.


The Taliban sits atop vast untapped natural resources, including copper, iron, gold, rare earths, and significant oil reserves. The latest geological surveys seem to have reignited Trump’s interest in the land America once abandoned. Doing business with the Taliban is not that easy, as the heavily sanctioned, cash-strapped Taliban now runs the world’s biggest opium trade. Illiteracy, rampant corruption, and widespread crime further complicate any potential undertaking. Re-operating Bagram would require billions of dollars of investment, which brings in significant risks. Since the West’s exit, the geopolitics of Afghanistan has changed drastically. China has invested heavily in Afghanistan, securing over 200 mining contracts to extract Afghanistan’s natural wealth.


This investment dynamic positions China as a key player, resistant to any U.S. presence in Afghanistan. The resistance is especially strong given Bagram’s proximity to a Chinese nuclear facility and regions of ethnic unrest involving Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities.


For Iran, too, a possible return of U.S. control over Bagram would constitute a threat to the so far uninterrupted Iran-China trade, the revival of its nuclear programme, or the carrying on of other economic activities sanctioned by the West. The U.S. would use Bagram to monitor Iran, given its proximity to the Iranian border—closer than the Pakistani air base from which the U.S. struck Iran’s nuclear facilities during the peace dialogues. As a response, Iran had then fired a few missiles in Qatar’s skies, but now operating Bagram airbase would put the U.S. troops within striking range of Iranian missiles.


Russia would also not want NATO to re-enter its sphere of influence, whether in neighbouring countries or lands afar.


Reclaiming and operating Bagram would not only expose the United States to significant challenges and resistance from both within and around Afghanistan, but it would also highlight the blunder of the past.


(The writer is a foreign affairs expert. Views personal.)

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