 "#MainBhiChowkidar: BJP leaders, including Narendra Modi, Amit Shah, add 'Chowkidar' to their Twitter names")
A day after the BJP launched its #MainBhiChowkidar campaign on Twitter, several party leaders added the word “Chowkidar” to their names on the social media platform and also tweeted various videos in support of the campaign. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, BJP president Amit Shah as well as state and national BJP leaders changed their names on Twitter. This includes Union ministers Piyush Goyal, Arun Jaitley, Ravi Shankar Prasad, JP Nadda, Jayant Sinha and Dharmendra Pradhan, and party leaders Amit Malviya, Suresh Nakhua, Mukul Roy, Jitu Vaghani, Raghubar Das, among others. However, there are a few prominent BJP ministers who have yet to add the “Chowkidar” tag to their Twitter names. These include Nirmala Sitharaman, Sushma Swaraj and Rajnath Singh. Karnataka BJP chief BS Yeddyurappa and his Kerala and Maharashtra counterparts, Kummanam Rajasekharan and Raosaheb Patil Danve, are also among them. In their tweets, the BJP leaders used the hashtag #ChowkidarPhirSe in a bit to garner votes ahead of the general election starting11 April.
The videos the ministers tweeted show ordinary citizens calling themselves ‘chowkidars’ of the economy and other fields. Each video refers to one of the Centre’s most publicised initiatives, including demonetisation, the Swachh Bharat Mission and Modicare.
The #MainBhiChowkidar campaign includes a song and a few lines from the prime minister’s Twitter handle, where he urges everyone to take the “Main Bhi Chowkidar” (I am a watchman, too) pledge. It stresses that every Indian fighting corruption and social evils, or working hard for the country’s progress, is also a “chowkidar”.
Congress president Rahul Gandhi called the move ‘defensive’ , and his party leaders hit back with the “chowkidar chor hai” (watchman is the thief) jibe_._