Gurugram: Wedding in Udaipur, receptions at Pushkar, Adampur and Delhi and an expected over 1.50 lakh guests in attendance — senior BJP leader and former MP Kuldeep Bishnoi’s son’s wedding on 22 December promises to be a grand affair.
The son, Bhavya Bishnoi, is the BJP MLA from the Adampur assembly constituency, the seat his grandfather — former Haryana Chief Minister Bhajan Lal — turned into a family bastion when he won the 1968 assembly election from here. While Bhajan Lal went on to win seven more elections from here, between 1977 and 2005, his wife Jasma Devi won the seat in 1987 and Kuldeep went on to win a 1998 bypoll from here, before winning the 2009, 2014 and 2019 elections from the seat. Kuldeep’s wife, Renuka, won a by-election from the seat in 2012 and the seat passed on to Bhavya in 2022, when he won a by-election on a BJP ticket, following then Adampur MLA Kuldeep’s resignation from the Congress to join the BJP.
Bhavya’s fiancee, Pari Bishnoi, is an IAS officer of the Sikkim cadre, currently posted as a sub-divisional magistrate (SDM) in Gangtok.
Talking about the baraat (wedding procession) in Udaipur on 22 December and the subsequent receptions in honour of the couple, Kuldeep told ThePrint over telephone Wednesday, “We have planned the first reception in Pushkar, Rajasthan, on 24 December, a second one at Adampur on 26 December, and the third one in New Delhi on 27 December.”
The BJP leader added: “For the Pushkar event, invitations are being sent to guests who are from Rajasthan. I expect 30 to 50 thousand guests to attend the Pushkar event. For the 26 December event at Adampur, over one lakh guests are expected, while the Delhi reception on 27 December is expected to be attended by 2,500 to 3,000 guests, including some Central leaders”.
While Adampur is the family bastion and the Delhi reception is to be expected — as most senior leaders are in the national capital — the Pushkar reception is being seen as a nod to the fact that the bride’s family is from Rajasthan, and also owing to Kuldeep being made the BJP’s co-in-charge ahead of the 25 November elections, which the party won with an impressive margin.
Kuldeep informed that he would personally visit all 55 villages in the Adampur assembly segment, as well as 31 villages in the Nalwa constituency to, to extend an invitation to all the villagers, before his team goes there to deliver the invitation cards to each family.
“My father, Chaudhary Bhajan Lal, too visited all these villages personally when I got married on 18 November, 1991. He was the state chief minister at the time,” said Kuldeep.
Explaining the visit to the 31 Nalwa villages, he added, “all these villages were a part of the Adampur constitutency before the delimitation of 2007-08”.
The senior BJP leader further said that he had already covered 55 villages in Adampur between Saturday and Monday. He had started visiting the Nalwa villages Tuesday and expected to cover them by Wednesday evening, he added.
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Actual invites to be sent out after dora ceremony
Before winning the Adampur bypoll last year, Bhavya, had contested the 2019 Lok Sabha elections from Hisar on a Congress ticket, but lost to the BJP’s Brijendra Singh.
He holds an MSc. degree in Modern South Asian Studies from Oxford University and a Masters in Public Administration from Harvard Kennedy School, United States.
Pari, has worked in the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, before being posted as the SDM, Gangtok.
In September this year, Pari applied for deputation to Haryana, saying she wanted to be closer to her ailing father. The orders are likely to be issued by the Ministry of Personnel and Training, according to a source close to the Bishnoi family.
Talking about the various wedding rituals to be expected ahead of Bhavya and Pari’s wedding, the Bishnoi family’s media in-charge Mohit Sharma said, “In our tradition, the bride’s family sends the bridegroom’s family an invitation to come with the baraat. Along with the invitation, the family also sends a sacred thread for the bridegroom called dora, which is tied on the groom’s wrist. The dora as many knots as the number of days left for the wedding. On each of the days leading up to the wedding, one of the knots on the dora is untied.”
Reiterating that Kuldeep had been visiting villages across Adampur and Nalwa to extend personal invitations to the residents, Sharma added that actual invitations will be delivered after 8 December, when the tying of the dora on Bhavya’s wrist is scheduled.
Sharma added that Bishnoi has already held a meeting with his workers from all nine assembly segments of the Hisar parliamentary seat — Hisar, Hansi, Uklana, Uchana, Bawani Khera, Nalwa, Adampur, Barwala and Narnaund — from where Bhajan Lal had won in 2009 and Kuldeep himself won in 2011 (after his father’s death) about invitations to the reception.
After the dora ceremony, the workers will deliver invitations, that will include the cards and “peele chawal” (yellow rice) to all houses in the Hisar seat.
“Peele chawal” was traditionally sent out as an auspicious symbol to announce a wedding in the family.
(Edited by Poulomi Banerjee)
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