Ahmed Patel, political secretary of India’s ruling Congress party and right-hand man of Congress President Sonia Gandhi will host his son’s wedding function on Friday and reception on Sunday in New Delhi.

Gujarat’s Bharuch based Faisal Patel(30), an MBA from a foreign university, will marry Kashmiri bride Zainab Nedou who belongs to Jammu and Kashmir’s famous Nedous family to which Farooq Abdullah’s mother Akbar Jehan belonged. Akbar Jehan was the daughter of Michael Harry Nedou, an Austro-Swiss settler who married a Kashmiri Gujjar girl Mirjan. Harry’s father Michael Adam Nedou had founded the Gulmarg hotel and several other hotels in undivided India.

Zainab is a communication officer in the Delhi office of the UNAIDS joint UN programme on HIV/AIDS. She is the daughter of Omar Nedou, a Srinagar-based hotelier, whose family established the famous Nedous Hotel in the hill resort of Gulmarg 122 years ago.

Faisal Patel

Muzaffar Ahmad Shah, an uncle of Zainab is President of the Awami National Conference and son of former Chief Minister G.M.Shah and Khaleda Shah, sister of Farooq Abdullah. Shah said the Nedou family has old links with Gujarat. ‘In fact, Michael Adams Nedou was basically an architect. He came from Europe to the subcontinent to build a palace for the Gujarat royal family. Then he made the Indian subcontinent his field of action,’ Shah recalled.

The invitation card for the reception mentions Patel’s daughter and son-in-law as the hosts.