50 chartered planes to ferry VVIPs for Nagpur function
NAGPUR: Over 10,000 guests, most of them VVIPs like Union home minister Rajnath Singh, BJP president Amit Shah, industrialists Mukesh Ambani and Ratan Tata, Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray, Union ministers and chief ministers, will be flown to the city in 50 charter flights on Sunday evening. The reason — the wedding of Union minister Nitin Gadkari’s daughter.
The VVIP guests’ list also include former deputy prime minister LK Advani and Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) chief Raj Thackeray.
Believe it or not, air tickets from any place to Nagpur on December 3 and 4 are not available.
Among the other VVIP guests are Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar, filmstars Hema Malini and Amitabh Bachchan, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar, and industrialist Kumar Mangalam Birla.
The wedding will be solemnised at Rani Kothi on Wardha Road in Nagpur. A similar gathering of VVIPs was witnessed in Nagpur when Gadkari’s eldest son, Nikhil, married Rutuja in December 2010, when Gadkari was the BJP president. Gadkari’s other son, Sarang, is also married.
This time, Gadkari’s daughter Ketki, the youngest among three siblings, will tie the nuptial knot with Aditya, the son of Sandhya and Ravindra Kaskhedikar of Nagpur. The bridegroom works with social networking group Facebook in the US.
The two-week winter session of the Maharashtra state legislature also begins here from December 5 and hence almost all legislators are expected to attend the wedding.
But there are murmurs of disapproval of such a lavish display of wealth, particularly when the Narendra Modi government demonetised high-value currency notes. “Such a lavish wedding supposedly goes against the RSS ethos, as Gadkari was groomed in RSS culture and is still a swayamsevak,” said a senior swayamsevak on condition of anonymity.