New Delhi, Feb 11 (IExpress) : The musicians were told to play it down, the firecrackers were kept aside, and the guests were asked to keep it quiet.
Around 1,000 km away from the BJP HQ in New Delhi, the real impact of Tuesday’s rout was playing out at the YMCA Club in Ahmedabad — during the wedding of BJP chief Amit Shah’s son. What was expected to be a spectacular affair with a “grand musical entry” for the groom from the nearby Mahakali temple was instead a subdued afternoon — even Prime Minister Narendra Modi was absent.
It’s been a bizarre journey for Shah, from the engagement ceremony of Jay to Rishika on July 13, 2014, days after he became BJP president, to this day when his party ended up with just three seats to AAP’s 67 out of 70 in the national capital. “The engagement function was held only a couple of days after Shah got elevated as national chief. Then, there were two reasons two celebrate,” said a BJP leader from Gujarat, who was present at the wedding.
“But this time Shah, who was praised for the party’s wins in Maharashtra, Haryana, Jharkhand and even in Jammu and Kashmir, is looking a bit down. He has tasted his first defeat on a very important day for the family,” the leader added. At the posh venue on S G Highway, as a group of Brahmin priests from Chennai chanted the wedding mantras, Shah, dressed in a beige kurta and jacket with a red turban, preferred not to talk about Delhi, sources said.
He had already held a short meeting with top leaders such as Arun Jaitley, Rajnath Singh and Rajiv Pratap Rudy at the venue earlier, they added.
But the guest list, expectedly, was an impressive one, with the presence of Union ministers such as Jaitley and Nitin Gadkari, and top industrialists including Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani.
Senior party leaders, including L K Advani and J P Nadda, had arrived here on Monday night. And others such as Piyush Goyal, Dharmendra Pradhan, Rajnath Singh and Gadkari arrived this morning.
Suresh Soni from RSS and Baba Ramdev were also there, along with Ashok Singhal and a host of Gujarat leaders led by Chief Minister Anandiben Patel and Finance Minister Saurabh Patel.