Ever since it lost power to the Congress in Karnataka in 2023, the BJP has kept the Siddaramaiah government engaged in ceaseless cultural warfare. It’s a strategy to recover the conservative vote that crossed over to the Congress in the last Assembly election.
Cultural issues are the BJP’s stock in trade and serve to keep the State administration bogged down in painstaking justification and competitive posturing.
Some of these issues have arguably been substantive and fair enough to raise, such as the 2024 controversy over Waqf Board notices to farmers in Vijayapura — which the BJP labelled as ‘land jihad’ — and the move to tax temple incomes — which it likened to ‘Jizya tax".
But most have been pointless or exhibitionist, such as the kerfuffle over a 108-foot flagpole in a Mandya village, the inclusion of boiled eggs in the school midday meal, or the competition of Savarkar and Tipu Sultan posters.
The current controversy over engaging the film actress Tamannaah Bhatia as brand ambassador for Mysore Sandal Soap belongs to the latter category.
The BJP and pro-Kannada groups see an incongruity in selecting an actress with Punjabi-Sindhi roots to be the face of Mysore Sandal, a sandalwood-scented brand of soap that is iconic in Karnataka.
The brand’s history dates back to the World War I period when Maharaja Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV of the erstwhile Kingdom of Mysore set up the Government Soap Factory in Bangalore and sent an industrial chemist to London to master soap-making technology and develop a unique formula using sandalwood oil.
In later years, the brand’s emblem Sharabha, a mythical creature with the body of a lion and the head of an elephant, evolved and added to the mystique of the brand. Recognising the unique attributes of the brand, it was granted a Geographical Indication (GI) tag in 2006.
The question to consider is whether Tamannaah’s persona contradicts the values of the brand. Patently not, according to the management. Although not a Kannadiga, Tamannaah has appeal across India having worked in films in several languages.
This would go well with the crossover appeal of the brand itself. As the government says, only 8-12% of the sales of Mysore Sandal are in Karnataka, with 18 per cent in Telangana, and 7% per cent in north India and 1% per cent internationally.
As a brand decision, there is nothing suggesting that this is not a sound one.
The brand managers of Mysore Sandal have their eyes set on markets beyond Karnataka and a distinctly younger audience that gets its cues from social media. In fact, a previous face of the brand was even more far out than Tamannaah: It was MS Dhoni, a male from Jharkhand.
The annals of brand marketing in India are full of examples of states seeking brand ambassadors beyond their borders. Gujarat chose Amitabh Bachchan, of Kolkata provenance, to be the face of its tourism initiative. Shah Rukh Khan, a Delhiite, has been a long-standing brand ambassador for West Bengal.
Sanjay Dutt fronted Arunachal Pradesh’s tourism campaign as did Priyanka Chopra Assam’s. No one saw anything amiss when Madhuri Dixit promoted Odisha's handloom industry and AR Rahman spoke for Sikkim. Had regional pride been the only consideration, would Aishwarya Rai have been engaged to launch a thousand ships?