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| The young have suddenly become centrestage in electoral politics. And they’re being ardently wooed by the major political parties, Seetha discovers |
Varun Kumar is eagerly waiting for May 7. That’s the day Delhi goes to vote and the 19-year-old student is excited about pressing that little green button on the voting machine. For the very first time. “It’s nice to know that I may just have a hand in determining who rules us,” he says. In Chennai, 24-year-old software |
Oh, but they do.
Twenty-one years after a Congress government led by Rajiv Gandhi lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 and brought in 99 million voters to the electorate, Gen-X is once again at the centrestage of electoral politics. And it’s being wooed ardently by an 81-year-old prime ministerial aspirant, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s L.K. Advani, and the Congress’s 38-year-old to the prime minister-ship born, Rahul Gandhi. “There will definitely be a huge youth segment in these elections,” says Sudheendra Kulkarni, who’s in charge of Advani’s campaign office and heads a largely under-40 team of volunteers and full-time party members.
The number of youth voters is not very clear, since the Election Commission (the only source of electorate-related data) does not keep an age-wise break up. But psephologists put the share of the 18-30 age group at around 40 per cent. Push the age ceiling to 35 or 40 and this group could well constitute almost half the electorate.
“This is a significant section of the population which plays a major role in opinion making,” says Nilotpal Basu, member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Apart from the numbers, what’s going to make the youth crucial in these elections, he says, is the overall environment in which they are being held — the global recession taking a toll on jobs.
It’s a section that can make or mar a party’s future. “What is significant about the youth vote is not size but the fact that it is not party loyal,” says G.V.L. Narasimha Rao, the managing director of the Delhi-based polling agency, Development and Research Services, and a BJP member. “This has emerged as a swing group.” Indeed, in an ironic twist of fate, Rajiv Gandhi lost the 1989 elections, the first in which the group that he had enfranchised voted. Rao attributes the surprise wins of Nitish Kumar in Bihar in 2005, Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh and Narendra Modi in Gujarat in 2007 and Sheila Dikshit in Delhi in 2008 to the youth factor. This group, he argues, is not ideologically rigid and votes on the basis of performance and the personality of a leader. Take the case of 28-year-old corporate executive Anuradha Agnihotri, who has voted in every election since she turned 18. “If the party whose ideology I agree with puts up an unsuitable person, I would vote for an independent candidate,” she says.
But getting Gen-X to the polling booth is not going to be a cakewalk. A survey of 5,000 people in the 14-34 age group, in a to-be-published report on “Indian Youth in a Transforming World’’ by three academics from the Delhi-based Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), shows that the youth are largely disinterested in politics —only 13 per cent reported a high degree of interest while 24 per cent reported moderate levels of interest.
Campaigns such as Jaago Re!, a joint initiative of the Bangalore-based NGO Janaagraha and Tata Tea to shake off voter apathy, have been focusing on young voters, fanning out across colleges and offices with a large youth workforce, getting them to register as voters and exhorting them to vote. It covered 148 institutions between September 2008 and February 2009. During the Delhi Assembly elections, the state Election Commission also targeted the young through jingles set to the tune of the chartbuster Pappu can’t dance, saala. As of March 2, 3.8 lakh people had applied for registration as voters through Jaago Re!, of which 3.1 lakh are in the 18-35 years category.
The parties themselves are leaving nothing to chance. Both the Youth Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM), the youth wings of the Congress and the BJP, have been identifying first time voters, helping them register and telling them how important it is for them to exercise their vote. Of course, they’re throwing in some party propaganda, like the Youth Congress telling voters about Rajiv Gandhi’s role in lowering the voting age. The BJYM has also set up booth-level committees in which groups of 20 active workers will be in regular touch with young voters in that area and bring them to the polling booth on voting day.
Some regional parties are also doing their bit. With the advantage of having a young leader, Raj Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman Samiti is going all out to recruit 18- year-olds into the party and getting them to help new voters register. The CPI(M) isn’t concentrating specifically on voter turnout. “High turnouts are quite common in our strongholds,” says Basu. What the party is focusing on, especially through its youth and student wings, is to raise youth awareness on issues concerning them and the country. “If there is greater awareness of the importance of these elections and their bearing on the life of the youth, that itself will ensure a good turnout,” says Basu.
Parties are hitting campuses in a big way. “A large section of first time and new voters are students, who are the most enthusiastic group, once they are motivated,” says Kulkarni. Rahul Gandhi has been criss crossing the country, bonding with students at colleges and universities, promising that the Congress will give more tickets to young candidates.
In late February, the BJP kicked off its Advani@campus series at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, where party MP Arun Shourie explained the BJP’s and Advani’s vision for the country to students. The party plans to get young campaigners to cover 5,000 campuses. It has taken the lead in using the Internet in a big way to tap the youth voter, especially through Advani’s website, lkadvani.in. The party has links to social networking sites and now bloggers are being asked to put a button on their blogs which links to the site. “The college-going youth are the greatest users of IT,” says Prodyut Bora, convenor of the BJP’s information technology cell and a key manager in Advani’s campaign. “And these are the voters who are up for grabs.”
The Congress is also trying to make political careers more accessible to Young India, with the Youth Congress kicking off an enrolment drive which has been completed in Punjab and Gujarat. Plans to extend this to other states will have to be put off till the general elections are over, says Youth Congress chief Ashok Tanwar.
Young people certainly seem to be shedding their reservations and joining or volunteering for political parties, though Rao feels the numbers are not large enough or even adequate. Youth Congress membership in Punjab and Gujarat has crossed 323,000 and 700,000, respectively, and Tanwar says the party is flooded with offers from young people wanting to do part time work during the elections.
Young professionals are putting in 12-hour days at Advani’s campaign office. There’s 23-year-old Mallika Noorani from Mumbai, who’s taken a three-month break from her job at an investment bank. Banuchandar, a 28-year-old trained mechanical engineer who was working at a leading global consultancy firm and joined the BJP a year ago, and Anay Joglekar, 29, who was working at a foreign consulate in Mumbai, quit their jobs in February to help out with the campaign. None of them comes from political families or even took an interest in student politics while in college. Advani’s website has pulled in over 6,000 online volunteers — a majority of them below 40 years — offering to pitch in with the campaign.
That’s the attitude political parties are banking on. But will it bring dividends? Wait till May 16 to find out.
Additional reporting by Manjula Sen in Mumbai
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