It’s the big fat wedding in the BJP. Party president Nitin Gadkari is known to preach austerity but the extravaganza he has organised to celebrate the wedding of his only son Nikhil in Nagpur, headquarters of the RSS, is to be seen to be believed.
The entire Vidarbha Cricket Association stadium has been hired for the reception for thousands of his select VIP guests on Friday, to be specially flown in from different parts of the country. Most of the hotels in Nagpur have been booked for these guests, numbering almost 20,000, including top political leaders and industry honchos. Twenty aircraft belonging to different private airlines have been chartered to fly Mr Gadkari’s guests from New Delhi and Mumbai to Nagpur. Sources claimed that party leaders taking these flights were expected to shell out `7,000 as airfare.
Nikhil Gadkari, a 25-year-old businessman, solemnised his marriage with 22-year-old Rutuja, daughter of a bank official, in Nagpur on Thursday, in a ceremony attended by at least 2,000 people, including family members. The celebrations will continue over four days, including the VIPs’ reception on Friday and a far bigger event for the inhabitants of Nagpur over the weekend, where the turnout is expected to be well over one lakh. The doting father is rumoured to have gifted the couple a lavishly-appointed bungalow in Nagpur.
The guest list for Friday includes President Pratibha Patil, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Congress president Sonia Gandhi, her son and AICC general secretary Rahul Gandhi, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat and all top BJP leaders — including L.K. Advani, Sushma Swaraj, Arun Jaitley and the chief ministers of all BJP-ruled states. The Maharashtra brigade includes chief minister Prithiviraj Chavan, NCP president Sharad Pawar, Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray, executive president Uddhav Thackeray, MNS chief Raj Thackeray and others. Mr Gadkari, who is chairman of the Purti Group of Companies, had made it a point to personally invite finance minister Pranab Mukherjee to the wedding. The company controls sugar mills, power units, an ethanol plant, a solvent extraction plant and a supermarket chain, a BJP leader said.
From the corporate world, both Mukesh and Anil Ambani, Ratan Tata, Vijay Mallya and Kumar Mangalam Birla are on the list. Filmstars expected to attend include Amitabh Bachchan and star BJP MPs Shatrughan Sinha, Hema Malini and Vinod Khanna.
All top hotels in Nagpur have been booked for all four days, the sources said. There are also reports of some school and college buildings being booked for the lavish celebrations.
In an open letter to the BJP president, meanwhile, the Vidarbha Farm Widows Association has demanded that its members be invited to the mega-wedding. Nagpur and Amravati are revenue divisions of Vidarbha, which have hit national headlines in recent years for their record number of farmer suicides. Gadkari loyalists claim that his “empire is something like social entrepreneuership and that the group supports the Vidarbha farmers.”