Now BSY Brigade on the Lines of NaMo Brigade!
Bengaluru: Some three years ago – on July 14, 2013 to be precise – a group of IT and BT professionals and yuppies had got together in Bengaluru to launch NaMo Brigade. It aimed to be a forum to project the then-CM of Gujarat, Narendra Damodardas Modi, who was earlier restricted just to his own terrain as a politician, as the future prime minister.
It was a well-organized strategy in preparation for the Lok Sabha elections which were to follow in 2014. The campaign may have clicked far beyond the expectations of the creators themselves.
The acronym, NaMo, itself, standing for Narendra Modi, was an impressive coinage. Mostly because it stood for an age-old salutation in Sanskrit. It caught the imagination of a large segment of the Indian middle class and the young educated class who were looking for a change.
Quite expectedly, as the old saying goes, success has had many fathers. Bihar’s BJP leader and Bollywood’s erstwhile Bad Boy ‘Shotgun’ Sinha, claimed in a newspaper interview in 2014 that NaMo was his brainwave. Besides, he also claimed credit for ‘SuMo’ for Sushil Modi in Bihar.
But a little research into the genesis of NaMo has revealed something otherwise. The BJP had hired a brilliant combination of advertising gurus in the sector – Piyush Pandey of Ogilvy & Mather, Prasoon Joshi of McCann Worldgroup and Sam Balsara of Madison World – to bolster its Lok Sabha campaign in 2014.
They were assisted by the formidable trio from Soho Square — Satish deSa, Anurag Khandelwal and Samrat Bedi. All of them together are said to have coined the slogans: “Ab Ki Baar Modi Sarkaar”, “Jantaa Maaf Nahi Karegi” and “Achchey Din Aaney Waaley Hain”, together with the now-popular brand, NaMo.
It was reported earlier this year that an Ahmedabad-based company had applied for a trademark registration in the name of Namo. The status of the application is not known.
Inspired by this experiment, a group of politicians in Karnataka has just launched a forum called BSY Brigade. This is to support and prop up the image of B S Yeddyurappa, former chief minister and current state president of the BJP, whose recent appointment is being resented in some quarters.
Curiously enough, the proclaimed motive of this forum, according to a media release issued by BSY Brigade president S Sangrama, is to mobilize public opinion against former deputy chief minister from BSY’s Shivamogga district, K S Eswarappa.
The Brigade says that Eswarappa has been needlessly playing hate politics against BSY because of jealousy over the latter’s popularity. Mass rallies against Eswarappa will be held in Shivamogga on July 10, in Hubballi on July 12, in Vijayapura on July 14, in Ballari on July 16, in Kalaburagi on July 18, in Bidar on July 20, in Mysuru on July 22 and finally in Bengaluru on July 24.
It is not yet known if this is being done with BSY’s approval or connivance or if the state party would allow this happen at a stage when fissures within have developed at the state level over the past few days. The promoters have cleverly given it a non-partisan complexion and avoided the mention of the party anywhere, in most likelihood, with an intention to bypass the disciplinary action.
A party functionary here said that the brand BSY would not click as NaMo had done. In a tongue-in-cheek quip, he said that if it was launched on the lines of NaMo, it should have been Boo-Si-Ye Brigade, based on the initials of Bookanakere Siddlingappa Yeddyurappa.