The South Wing

Of the over 700 million Indian adults who are eligible to vote in the 2009 general elections, approximately half are under 35. Four-fifths of these youths are literate and 12% of them will, if government statistics are to be believed, have gone through college. If this 40 million odd group were concentrated in one area, they would be able to elect 20 out of the 543 members of the 15th Lok Sabha. In fact, these voters are spread out, though the college educated are over-represented in urban areas and could swing the vote in many more than 20 constituencies, if only they bothered to vote, and did so as a bloc. Unfortunately, the college educated are disproportionately less likely to vote than the illiterate, a phenomenon that is the opposite of what you find in most mature democracies.

These young, urban, educated voters are the future of India. So what do they want in the next Prime Minister? Nobody knows. Indian psephological surveys tend to concentrate on the horse-race aspect of the elections, with newspapers and TV channels seeming to agree that this is an election with no major issues, a claim that should surprise anyone who has observed that India is suffering from an economic slowdown and has suffered multiple terrorist attacks, in addition to the continuing disgrace of poverty, malnutrition and illiteracy. What they actually mean is that the parties have dropped the pretense of fighting elections on the basis of issues, policies or programs. They fight instead on the basis of identity politics and alliances. Voting is largely determined by caste considerations and these votes will return to parliament a motley set of caste-based parties and some “national” parties. Some combination of these parties will find that they have the required number to form a government and so form an alliance to that end. The process of alliance-formation has nothing at all to do with the nominal policies or programs of those parties, which aren’t worth the paper they are printed on. In fact, in the last elections, one of these parties, the BSP, wisely decided to save paper by refusing to publish a manifesto.

So, before we ask which policies and programs the new voters are likely to support, it is important to ask whether they will, in fact, vote on policies and programs. The answer is probably mixed. Educated people are more aware and more tuned to mass media, suggesting that issues might matter to them more. They are also more mobile. When they move to cities, their economic interests tend to cut across caste-lines, particularly as Indian kinship based caste-allegiances are highly local, and difficult to sustain over larger areas.

This means that we are likely to see the emergence of two often contradictory trends.

First, we will see an increased trend of voters actually voting on the basis of policies or issues. Leaders and parties will find that it makes sense for them to cut out the intermediaries and form direct “contracts” with the people. In recent years, we have seen an increasing trend of chief ministers of states trying to get reelected by offering good and efficient administration, and some are actually succeeding. The fact that offering efficient administration is a novel trend is by itself a comment on Indian democracy.

Apart from good governance and efficiency, it is difficult to predict which side of the economic battlefield the educated youth will align themselves to. There isn’t a strong popular movement or political party that articulates the free-market position. India has never experienced totalitarian oppression, which means that the choice between Communism and Capitalism is not as stark and clear as it is in Western minds. The idea that the government would work if only it were made more efficient still has an unfortunately strong hold on the young and educated. The young and educated are of course the largest beneficiaries of the free-market miracle that the country has enjoyed, but they also tend to be children of the beneficiaries of socialist policies, and socialism has worked for them – and from there, it is easy to generalize that socialism can work for everyone only if honest and committed people were in charge.

The second trend is that the new voters will tend to affiliate themselves with a larger identity. The popularity of the Hindu Nationalist BJP among the youth can thus be easily explained. Hindu Nationalism, as it was originally conceived, was not an attempt to establish a Hindu theocracy, but a way to build a new nation. Indian Nationalism has always drawn on Hindu cultural symbols, so when Indian youth begin to rise above their narrow caste-based identities and begin to care about national level issues, their attraction towards the Hindu Nationalism is natural. Support for the BJP is in a sense a combination of the two trends. It has also to do with the fact that in the 90s when it emerged as a major player, it was seen as a party with a difference and had reputation (which later proved to be undeserved) for honesty, in contrast to the Indian National Congress which was seen to have institutionalized corruption.

This is not to deny that the BJP has also pursued caste-based strategies, focused on the upper castes. Some part of the support among the educated youth has to do with the fact that educated youth tend to be upper caste, and in supporting the BJP, they are often simply following family tradition. We should also be careful not to minimize the extent of outright anti-Muslim bigotry, which unfortunately tends to get conflated with a hawkish stance on national security issues.

Religion is, however, only one of the larger identities that the youth are affiliating themselves to. Language is another. Caste, by itself could be yet another. The BSP, which we have encountered earlier, is trying to craft a nationwide strategy where the lower castes unite and see themselves as part of a larger movement of oppressed people. The rise of an educated class among the lower castes is driving this trend. If the BSP succeeds, we will see their leader Mayawati as Prime Minister. She has no pretensions to honesty, no claims of providing good governance. Her entire plank is that the upper castes have oppressed the poor for long, and now it is her turn.

In other words, India’s democracy will probably be as messy as it has been. There will be change, but it will not have the revolutionary elegance that the campaigners on Facebook groups or organizers of candlelight vigils hope for. We shouldn’t assume that the Facebook group and folks who show up on TV speak for all Indians or even for the educated, middle-class, English speaking young Indians. India’s young, even as they get educated, move to the middle-class and into cities, remain almost as diverse as their parents, which should make us wary of all generalizations about them, including those in this article. But what they decide could help determine India’s future.

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