5,000 NRIs in India to campaign for BJP

Now, the Bharatiya Janata Party is using NRIs from the U.S. to campaign for the party. About 5,000 NRIs, belonging to the organisation ‘Overseas Friends of BJP’ (OFBJP), have come to India to campaign for the party.

According to Chandrakant Patel, president of the OFBJP, these professionals, mostly techies, have taken a break from their jobs to work for the BJP in the elections. Some of them or on leave without pay.

They have been deployed to different States — Gujarat, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan — to work for the party and it’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi.

Chandrakant Yatnatti, an NRI from Bagalkot who is in-charge of the NRIs’ Karnataka campaign on behalf of the OFBJP, says that about 1,000 of them are working in Karnataka. “While the highest number have gone to Gujarat, the second highest have been deployed to Karnataka,” he says.

The team that is working in Karnataka has members from U.S. cities such as California, Arizona and New Jersey.

He told a press conference in Bangalore on Friday that they are dedicating four to five hours a day for the campaign by focussing on social media. They have a database of voters and are contacting them via telephone and making a personal appeal to them to support the BJP, he says.

Theme

Their main campaign theme is the personality of BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi and his achievements as Chief Minister of Gujarat. According to him, the feedback is good as the voters are responding positively to them. He made it clear that these NRIs are not just looking at fellow NRIs, but wooing everybody.

The organisation has already held about 90 ‘ chai pe charchas’ in the U.S.