First it was an animated movie, now a downloadable game is in the pipeline. Gujarat BJP’s IT Cell is sparing no effort to push Narendra Modi to the national centrestage. The cyber campaign for Narendra Modi as a national leader is only getting hotter ahead of the Lok Sabha elections.“We are looking at having Narendrabhai at the Centre sooner than later and are working at it seriously,” says the Convener of BJP’s IT Cell Dr Shashiranjan Yadav. The cell, which ran an intense campaign for the BJP with significant success in the last Assembly elections, is now busy moving to the next level: a concerted cyber campaign through blogging.“Besides the official website of the Gujarat BJP, we maintain a site for Narendra Modi fans too. We now plan to upgrade it both in terms of content and technology,” Yadav said, adding that while the site fansofnarendramodi.org was so far providing downloadable campaign wallpapers and ringtones for mobile phones, a downloadable Modi game will be launched shortly. “This idea came after the big success of the animated Modi films that we had uploaded last year,” Yadav added.Yadav, however, does not want to be seen tweaking the party’s national line: “Our projection of Narendrabhai will be as a popular national leader, not as the next prime minister,” he insisted.Others are more open on that ticklish issue. “This club is for the fans of our future prime minister and brave outspoken leader, Mr Narendra Modi,” says a cyber community of Modiphiles. Named after Narendra Modi, the club in Orkut claims more than one thousand members and has Mayur Dave, a BJP municipal councillor from Ahmedabad, as the moderator.Besides sites like Orkut, audio-visual postings on Gujarat’s urban development and Modi’s particularly aggressive speeches are now flooding YouTube. Most such postings appear under names like Vande Gujarat, Sacho Gujarati etc. Yadav claims Modi fans do such postings, not the BJP IT cell. “We cannot control the content of all postings,” he said.
