Bharat Barai, a Chicago based physician and Narendra Modi’s old friend, along with a team of organisers had started planning the Prime Minister’s gargantuan Madison Square Garden (MSG) event over two months ago.
Barai is one of the five men in the core committee involved in over seeing Modi’s US trip. The others in the team are Chandrakant Patel, an Indian American community leader and president of the Overseas Friends of BJP (OFBJP-USA), Mahesh Mehta, founder of VHP-America, Ramesh Shah, a Houston-based financial consultant and vice president of the OFBJP and Yelloji Rao Majrekar, general secretary of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh.
At New York’s Madison Square Garden, a crowd of nearly 20,000 is expected to hear Modi. This would be the largest audience ever drawn by a world leader at the Madison Square Garden. Several others will throng to Times Square to watch him on screens put up there, sources said.
As many as 350 organisations gave lists of names and a lottery system was used to select people, they said.
There was a 50-member organising committee besides the five-member core committee looking at various aspects, of the Prime Minister’s US trip beginning on September 26.
Mumbai-born Barai has been involved in organising Modi’s interaction with the Indian diaspora when he was chief minister. He has been a key person engaged in working out Modi’s MSG programme in New York.
Patel, who is from Chhattisgarh and now a US-based businessman, has been active in several ethnic Indian organisations. As President of OFBJP, he worked on mission 272 ahead of the Lok Sabha elections fought under Modi’s leadership.
Mehta was founder of the VHP-America, which works in close coordination with the Sangh in India. He served as Chairman of the Global Vision 2000 conference in 1993 at Washington DC.
While Majrekar is with the HSS, a voluntary, non-profit organisation which conducts athletic and academic progammes, Ramesh Shah who is from Gujarat, had led a group of NRIs to campaign for the BJP in India.
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