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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 Red Thread Tightens

Correspondent
May 15, 2025
3 min read

China weaves Colombia into its Belt and Road web, nudging Latin America further from Washington’s grasp.

Beijing’s courtship of Bogotá marks another stitch in its grand design for a multipolar world as Colombia becomes the latest Latin American country to join China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a sprawling vision launched by Xi Jinping in 2013 to position Beijing as the nerve centre of 21st-century infrastructure, trade and digital connectivity. The embrace is economic, but the message is unmistakably geopolitical: the Monroe Doctrine is past its expiry date.


President Gustavo Petro’s decision to align Colombia with the BRI was long in the making. But its timing is telling. Washington, once the uncontested arbiter of hemispheric affairs, has grown increasingly wary of China’s expanding footprint in its backyard. For years, it has leaned on partners like Panama to abandon Beijing’s orbit, with some success. Yet now, the entry of Colombia, a staunch American ally in past decades, signals a shifting tide.


At the signing ceremony in Beijing, President Xi spoke in the lofty rhetoric of anti-imperial solidarity. Petro, in turn, spoke of ending Colombia’s $14 billion trade deficit with China and transforming his country into a strategic AI and interoceanic data hub linking Asia and Europe. The language was utopian. The motives are anything but.


Trade between China and Latin America surpassed $500 billion last year. As Washington remains mired in internal political dysfunction and selective protectionism (its latest universal 10 percent tariff on most imports being a case in point), Latin America is seeking partners that offer money with fewer moral lectures. For Beijing, the BRI is a geopolitical scalpel disguised as a cheque book. For leaders like Petro, who fancy themselves as voices of the Global South, it offers infrastructure, capital and symbolic autonomy from American tutelage.


Obviously, the BRI has its critics. In Africa and parts of Asia, it has been accused of engineering debt traps, tilting contracts in favour of Chinese firms, and fostering corruption among local elites. But it has also delivered tangible gains: roads, ports, railways and digital backbones in places where Western lenders often dither or attach strings too steep. In Latin America, China has funded hydropower projects in Ecuador, railways in Argentina, and lithium extraction in Bolivia. Now it wants fibre-optic routes through the Andes, ports along the Caribbean, and digital sovereignty for the nations that host its servers.


Colombia’s role in this architecture is not minor. It straddles two oceans, abuts the Panama Canal, and harbours ambitions of becoming a logistics and technology hub for the continent. Petro’s vision of turning Colombia into a nexus for undersea cables connecting China and Europe is less fanciful than it sounds. In a world increasingly driven by data, such nodes are worth more than oil pipelines.


Latin America is becoming the latest arena in the slow-burning geopolitical contest between the United States and China. For decades, Washington’s influence in the region was cemented through trade deals, aid programmes and military cooperation. Colombia, in particular, was long a poster child for US security diplomacy, receiving billions in aid under Plan Colombia to combat narcotraffickers and Marxist rebels. But Petro, a former guerrilla himself, represents a break from that legacy.


The symbolism of Colombia’s accession to the BRI should not be overstated, but neither should it be dismissed. It reflects a broader reality which is that America’s dominance in Latin America is no longer assumed. Where Washington offers conditionality, Beijing promises partnership. Where the United States frets about ideological alignment, China focuses on pipelines and ports.


Some, like Panama, have backed out under pressure. But Colombia is not Panama. Its weight, location, and economic ambitions make it a more consequential addition to China’s vision of a ‘multipolar world.’ Washington will need more than warnings and tariffs to compete.


If America wants to hold its sway in the region, it must offer an alternative rooted not just in fear of China, but in genuine economic engagement.

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