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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 Habitual Rebel

Writer: Abhijit Mulye
Abhijit Mulye
Nov 17, 2024
2 min read

Updated: Nov 18, 2024

Pankaja Munde

Pankaja Munde is not contesting the assembly elections this year. However, she has been campaigning for other candidates nominated by the party. In her own words, she has been travelling across the state trying to mend ways between the Maratha and the OBC communities. The communities are on loggerheads after the Manoj Jarange-Patil’s Maratha quota stir that wanted Marathas to be identified as OBCs. She belongs to prominent OBC caste Vanjari and hence it is believed that she had been trying to consolidate the OBC vote for her party candidates.


Born on July 26, 1979, in Parli Vaijnath to Pradnya and Gopianth Munde, a senior BJP leader and former Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra, Pankaja completed her schooling at Shri Saraswati Vidyalaya in Parli and later attended Jai Hind College in Mumbai. She graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree from Ramnarain Ruia College in 1999. She also has a management degree and is married to Amit Palwe, an IT professional. The couple have a son named Aryaman.


Pankja had been in headlines for all the wrong reasons over the past decade. It began even before the 2014 assembly election after the accidental demise of her father, who was then a union minister. Just ahead of the assembly polls she called herself the ‘CM in people’s minds’. It was considered to be the expression of her innate desire to rule the state and an expression related to the power struggle in the party.


After the election, she became minister of Rural Development, Women and Child Development, and Earthquake Rehabilitation departments. However, the ‘CM in people’s minds’ tag followed her. She used to speak about it too often. Unfortunately she also received the tag of the first minister of Devendra Fadnavis cabinet whose corruption was exposed. Though there was no immediate political loss to her, the corruption charges that came to be known as ‘Chikki Scam’ stuck to her name for a long time. To add to this insult, she had to bare the injury of losing assembly election in 2019. She wanted herself to be politically rehabilitated immediately. However, that too didn’t happen quickly.


In 2020 she was appointed as the National Secretary of the BJP. However, she kept sulking and lost the chance to take part in strengthening the party’s organizational structure and expanding its reach at the grassroots level.

espite facing challenges and controversies, Pankaja has remained steadfast in her commitment to public service. In the mean time she has mended ways with family members, especially estranged cousin Dhananjay Munde, for whom she even campaign in this election. It’ll be interesting to see how her political career takes turns in the future.

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