Why such reception?

THE very sight of hundreds of children  from some 140 schools of Ishwardi standing out in the open  for  a few hours in extreme cold to  accord a reception to the land minister was pointless, to put it mildly.  It even went against the government order of 2009, which prohibits closing of educational institutions and lining up of students during any visit by high government functionaries.  This ridiculous incident occurred on Tuesday at Ishwardi which is the minister's own constituency.  
Being a public representative, the minister should not have allowed such an event to happen in the first place that forced children to suffer, caused a lot of inconvenience to their parents and wasted work hours of teachers and students alike.
The entire incident harks back to the days of yore when extravagant receptions would be thrown to a royal dignitary by grateful courtiers or vassals. But we are not in olden days, rather we are in a democracy. Oddly though, forgetting that they are mere custodians of public trust, our public leaders often suffer from strange delusions of grandeur.  Even though this might have been an expression of sycophancy by party loyalists, why didn't the minister prevent it from doing it?   
This is also not for the first time that a minister has been given such a pompous, though agonising to the public, welcome.  They must get out of such showmanship, if they are to be called the keepers of public trust.