JALANDHAR, Punjab — “We married because of you @narendra Modi ji”
When Jamnagar-based professional translator and Narendra Modi supporter Jay Dave tweeted this to the Prime Minister on Monday, along with a photo of him and his wife Alpika wearing a saffron NaMo T-shirt, he may have underestimated the amount of attention it would receive.
When HuffPost India spoke to Dave on Tuesday after reaching out to him through a social media platform, he refused to divulge more details about the marriage or share photographs.
Dave sounded scared over the call and refused to even share their age, let alone other contact details.
“We got married on December 31 last year. My wife Alpika is a fashion designer. We had a traditional marriage and our families were part of the event,” said Dave, who also got his marriage registered recently.
In the tweet, which he later deleted, Dave said he met his wife after she ‘liked’ his comment supporting Modi on a Facebook post by Congress chief Rahul Gandhi. They then met to find out that they both wanted to “live for India, so we decided to do it together”.
The tweet had been engaged with hundreds of times before it was deleted.
So was the Modi factor the only reason for the couple getting married? Dave said that he took the plunge only because they both share the same political thinking. “We both want to do something for the country and that was the common goal that connected us,” said Dave.
His social media profiles are filled with photos with top BJP leaders including Amit Shah and Smriti Irani.
Immediately after the tweet, the couple began to get trolled by social media users. Some even called it a political gimmick and asked the couple to post the picture of their marriage.
Others asked Dave why he gave credit to Modi when he met Alpika through Rahul Gandhi’s Facebook page.