Despite The Delhi's Poll Debacle, Why BJP Chief Amit Shah Is Celebrating Today In Ahmedabad?

Amit Shah has no choice but to celebrate today. The Bharatiya Janata Party president will have to don his finest dhoti and smile while he greets his oldest friends and most important acquaintances. 

Postmortems of the colossal loss to the Aam Aadmi Party in Delhi will have to wait while his son gets married. Even master-strategist Shah could not anticipate that a wedding date decided many months in advance would possibly clash with counting day in the Delhi.

The big guns of the BJP have deserted their Delhi office, a gloomy place today anyway, for the festivities in Ahmedabad as Shah’s son Jay marries his college classmate Hrishita Patel to whom he got engaged last July. Hundreds of rooms in the city’s best hotels have been booked for the very many VVIPs, including Rajnath Singh, Sushma Swaraj, Arun Jaitley, Manohar Parrikar, Piyush Goyal, JP Nadda and Suresh Prabhu. Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani, Adani Group founder Gautam Adani, RSS leader V Satish and godman Baba Ramdev are among the attendees.

The Ahmedabad police have deputed hundreds of personnel to supervise traffic on all roads leading to the wedding and reception venues. On hand are a dog squad, a bomb disposal squad and anti-sabotage squad and an army of private bouncers for “largest gathering of VVIPs in the city”. The city has gone into a minor lockdown to ease the movement of the country’s top politicians, though it’s uncertain that Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be there.

Despite the high profile guests, the ceremony is expected to be a simple affair. The sombre mood and possibly some tactics to avoid the media waiting for a comment from Shah have cost the bridegroom his baraat. The procession to a live band that was planned earlier was cancelled and the wedding party assembled at the venue instead.

Ahmedabad journalists believe that the pomp and grandeur to be reserved for a reception in Delhi later this week. But being walloped as it has by the AAP today, the BJP and its president may still not be in a mood to celebrate.