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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 Sinic–Islamic Alliance: A Civilisational March Through History

Writer: Pulind Samant
Pulind Samant
Feb 15
4 min read

From Malacca to Bangladesh, a Sinic–Islamic alignment forged over centuries now reasserts itself with India squarely in its path.

American political scientist Samuel Huntington, in his 1996 book had theorized of a ‘clash of civilizations’ as the root cause of future global conflicts, emerging basically out of three factors - Western arrogance, Islamic intolerance and Sinic/Confusion/Chinese aggression. The history of conflicts unfolded thereafter stands to largely corroborate Huntington’s view. Further to identifying the warring (some willingly and some unwillingly) civilizations, Huntington had also pointed at an additional dimension of Sinic-Islamic alliance, by pointing at the then weapons proliferation between China and the Islamic world as the most extensive and concrete base of that connection, citing a number of instances of Chinese arms-supply to Islamic states of Iraq, Libya, Syria, and helping those like Pakistan and Iran in acquiring nuclear power technology and developing nuclear power. China’s special affection for Pakistan, reflecting in an intimate military relationship, had begun in the 1970s, growing more and more till date, was exposed once again during India’s ‘Operation Sindoor’ last May.


Islamic Onslaught

Huntington’s thesis, howsoever brilliant, suffered from an obvious limitation posed by his West-centric lenses. An Indian or Indic civilizational view-point can justifiably differ, in the sense of adding some worthy nuances, thereby widening the related time-frame of the civilizational rivalry playing out in the eastern Indo-Pacific. First of all, although Huntington theorized it in the mid-1990s, clashes of civilizations have taken place many times before that. The onslaught unleashed by Islam, post its birth in the seventh century, with a view to Islamizing the rest of the world, was a classic case in that context. The Spanish and Portuguese expeditions outside Europe, encouraged by papal blessings, were also no different in character. Secondly, even the Sinic-Islamic alliance is also not a twentieth century phenomenon for that matter.


Imperial China, obsessed with the self-image of being the ‘middle kingdom’ of the world, perhaps has been viewing the Indian/Indic civilization as a rival since centuries. History is aware of the supportive role played by China not only in founding the Islamic Sultanate of Malacca in Peninsular Malaysia in the beginning of the fifteenth century but also fortifying it with all the necessary support sustained through next few years, powering it to emerge as a prosperous Islamic religio-commercial hub of the Southeast Asian region. History is also aware of the active role, in turn, played by the Sultanate of Malacca in weakening the Majapahit empire of the Indonesian archipelago, the last and the strongest bastion of the Hindu-Buddhist civilization in Southeast Asia, and help engineering its eventual fall by the end of that century. The whole picture that emerges in this case, after joining the dots, stands testimony to the over five-hundred years old existence of Sinic-Islamic alliance that had successfully dislodged a robust flag-bearer of the Indic or Hindu-Buddhist civilization in its battle for survival in that geography of the world.   


Civilizational Response

A call for re-energizing the spirit of that alliance in a grand way was given last year. China and Malaysia took initiative in organizing an ‘ASEAN-GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council)-China’ Summit in Kuala Lumpur in the last week of May 2025. The theme was about organizing a ‘civilizational response’ to the global ‘xenophobia’, meaning their projections of Islamophobia and Sinophobia. This event can be viewed as nothing but reinforcing the historical alliance for the present global situations, and scaling it up to a grand level, attempting a Confusion collaboration with the entire Islamic world in place of the earlier Southeast Asia-confined model. Since it was the same Malaysia, on whose west coast the Malacca Sultanate had historically flourished with active Chinese help, both of them co-hosting this event carried a high symbolic value for all concerned.


Although China’s continuing appetite for alliance with the Islamic world is apparently global, the main theatre of action in the current century can be expected to be South Asia, where the base of an immediate rival from the vicinity viz. Indic or Hindu-Buddhist civilization exists in the entity of India. Action in the Southeast Asian theatre this time appears to have shrunk to only the publicity events, thereby indirectly messaging the Buddhist states of its mainland sub-region to be quieter and more submissive. All the necessary ground-work seem to be shaping up in a perfectly coordinated manner in the main theatre of South Asia in the meantime. The 2024 coup in Bangladesh, exiling PM Hasina to the expected refuge in India, made many experts speculate and link the intervention with either the US or China. Looking back, it can safely be presumed as rather a joint venture between both of them, with the latter having a larger and longer-term stakes involved. After the installation of ‘Nobel Laureate’ Yunus as interim administrator of Bangladesh by the US, the Sinic-Islamic alliance appears to have been activated in a logically sequential manner – i) Bangladesh practically transformed into its previous ‘East-Pakistan’ form by invoking rabid Islamism within; ii) it then formally renewed previously severed ties with Pakistan by not only forgetting the latter-committed genocide of 1971 but also by rewriting history to officially delete those records and erase memories, including those about India’s help in gaining freedom; iii) China organized a tri-lateral meeting with both of them, for discussing ‘maritime cooperation’ in the Indian Ocean; iv) China and Malaysia provided the intellectual cover of ‘struggle against Islamophobia and Sinophobia’ for all these manoeuvres.


The plot appears undoubtedly sinister. It would be naïve to imagine the entity of India meeting the Majapahit fate of downfall sooner or later. But the very fact of the well-coordinated Sinic-Islamic alliance having marched confidently across the Bay of Bengal, from Southeast Asian success to a South Asian dream-project, must cause longer-term worries in India, for bracing for all sorts of related challenges in future.    


(The writer is a research scholar in international relations. Views personal.) 

 


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