Suresh Paswan brews tea at his stall at south Mandiri on Wednesday. Picture by Sachin

The blasts that rocked Gandhi Maidan during the BJP’s Hunkar Rally have made their ripples felt even at the NaMo tea stalls across the city.

Several of the tea stalls, which had been decorated by the BJP as part of their campaign to promote Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi’s rally, have quickly shed their new identity.

Till Sunday — the day on which the Hunkar Rally was held — a popular tea stall near the College of Arts and Crafts at south Mandiri had colourful posters with pictures of Modi. One such poster read: “Nai soch, nai umeed (New thought, new hope)” and below it, “Kya ek chai bechne wala desh ka pradhanmantri ban sakta hain? (Can a tea vendor become the Prime Minister of the nation?)”

On Wednesday morning, the poster was missing. Suresh Paswan, the owner of the stall, was apprehensive of retaining the NaMo tag after the blasts. “I have removed the posters put up by the BJP because I do not want any controversy. Terrorists targeted the rally of Narendra Modi. Who knows? They might even target the NaMo tea stalls,” said Paswan. “I’m a poor man. This is my only source of income. I don’t want the security of my family to be made vulnerable to political violence.”

The BJP leaders were on an overdrive to christen tea stalls in Patna as NaMo stalls, ahead of the Hunkar Rally. Posters of Modi were put up in the stalls. The raison d’etre for adopting the stalls was to promote Modi’s meteoric rise through the ranks of the party from a tea seller at Vadnagar railway station to being elected chief minister of Gujarat thrice to being nominated as the prime ministerial candidate of the BJP.

NaMo posters have also vanished from a stall adjacent to BJP MLA Dilip Verma’s official residence at Vidyapati Road. Vijay, the owner, however, is quite eager to continue supporting Modi. “Some BJP workers took away the poster on the day of the Hunkar Rally. But I shall readily put up another Modi poster here if I were given one,” he said.

Asked about the removal of the Modi posters from the tea stalls, the man behind the campaign, Bankipore MLA Nitin Navin, told The Telegraph over phone from Delhi: “I’m not aware of the posters being removed. The stalls still had the posters when I left for Delhi on Monday.”

A few chaiwallahs, especially in the minority-dominated Phulwarisharif area, are dead against naming their stalls after Modi.

“I don’t want Modi’s name to be associated with my stall after what happed during the Gujarat riots of 2002,” said one of them.