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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.

Why blame the speechless leopards?

Writer: Abhilash Khandekar
Abhilash Khandekar
Dec 23, 2025
4 min read

Maharashtra’s leopard attacks are the bloodied consequence of unbridled urbanisation, where the appetite for ‘development’ has devoured habitats.

The growing number of leopard attacks in ‘progressive’ Maharashtra should be a concern for all those humans who seemingly insatiable appetite for infrastructural development and expansion of cities comes at the cost of nature.


Thus far, almost 40 casualties have been reported from Nashik, Jalgaon, Nandurbar, Pune and Ahilya Nagar areas. A lethal attack by the ferocious animal has also occurred near Nagpur. Maharashtra is one of the major states where great natural habitats had existed for wildlife to flourish in an organic manner. Yet, this kind of man-animal conflict is being witnessed there; it proves that adequate conflict mitigation steps were not planned. This chain of attacks is not only unfortunate, the incidents point to the abject failure of Maharashtra government as also of the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC).


Failed Plans

The MoEFCC is in charge of the protected forests, national parks and tiger reserves; the ministry makes policies for the green areas to sustain. These are the natural enclaves where the wild animals are expected to stay and grow with constant improvements in habitats and prey base. Wildlife Preservation Act 1972 is a central Act for wildlife protection in every possible manner but that is falling short of saving animals. It is noteworthy that the MoEFCC had issued a grand National Human-Wildlife Conflict Mitigation Strategy and Action Plan (HWC-NAP) in 2021. The action plan ends in 2026 and it seems the plan largely remained on papers or confined to handing out pay cheques as compensation to victims. Conflicts have not reduced at all despite many goals set in the five-year plan.


As for the spurt in leopard attacks, the Maharashtra Forest department alone must not be blamed or held responsible for the recent untoward developments because other departments like agriculture, industry, revenue and chiefly the urban development, also have a significant role in controlling these incidents--directly or indirectly. Shrinking green area in Maharashtra is a major cause of the wild animals straying into urban areas in search of food. If Kokan and Western Ghats are deducted, forest cover would slip into single digit which should worry Chief Minister Devendra Fadanvis.


What cost urbanisation?  That his forest minister Ganesh Naik has little or no understanding of forest and wildlife management is a different matter. His ridiculous remarks about conflict mitigation measures have exposed him completely.


Unbridled Expansion

Maharashtra is among the most rapidly urbanised states, leaving little pockets for the wildlife to thrive. Cities like Mumbai, Pune, Thane, Pimpri-Chinchwad, Nagpur, Sambhaji Nagar, or Nashik are expanding at a frightening speed; the road infrastructure is being pushed as if there is there is no tomorrow. Real estate prices are hitting the roof. Tree-cutting controversies in Mumbai or in Nashik (Tapovan) are too well-known for me to repeat here. 


Additionally, Maharashtra has the second largest population of leopards (1985), an animal species which is shy but aggressive when hungry. Leopards were not known to be man-eaters but with changing rural-urban landscape in Maharashtra, the conflict is getting intensified. Who is responsible? Not the leopards, for sure.


After Maharashtra, the highest number of leopards are found in MP (3,907) but attacks on humans are rare there. In fact, even tigers roam in municipal limits of Bhopal. No extreme conflict has been (luckily) recorded in which tiger has attacked humans in Bhopal.


With more forested areas in Madhya Pradesh than in Maharashtra, wild animals have better homes of their own.


The leopard-human conflict is part of an increasing trend in human wildlife conflict (HWC), seen across India. Between tiger and humans; elephants and humans these conflicts get highlighted from places like Chhattisgarh, UP, Uttarakhand and Madhya Pradesh. But it gets tragic turn when human lives are lost, like what is happening in Maharashtra. Elsewhere, black buck or blue bulls have been raiding farmlands to devour standing crops resulting in peasants complaining of losses and turning against wildlife in general. 


Madhya Pradesh is witnessing wild elephants menace for the past few years; it is a new phenomenon. The jumbos were not found in Madhya Pradesh’s forests, they have travelled from Odisha, Jharkhand in search of food and water. The government had formed two expert panels to investigate the issue and contain losses.


The problem with Maharashtra is its unmindful urbanisation. Already, 45 percent or more people live in cities. It looks like Pune and Mumbai may merge soon as both are expanding with madding speed eating up open lands and forest/grass lands between the two mega cities. State also grows sugar cane--these fields are ideal for leopards to hide and breed. The issue revolves around these two areas.


Although Melhgat, Tadoba and Western Ghats have dense forested areas, the leopard-human conflict is the direct result of fragmentation of habitats and growing urban areas.


Only a long-term green policy can save humans from this. Sending a few animals to the BJP-favoured ‘Vantara’ is not the solution. Blaming leopards will surely not help!


(The writer is a senior political and environmental journalist based in Bhopal. Views personal.)


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