Indian Politics : Lack of Youth Representation

By Deepak Parvatiyar

September 11, 2014

At a time when 50 per cent of India’s population is below the age of 30, why can’t we have dynamic and efficient young politicians in their twenties or thirties?

The general elections this year saw the highest number of young voters ever, yet it saw the highest ever percentage of older candidates becoming Members of Parliament! A research by PRS Legislative Research – a New Delhi-based independent research institute – showed that the proportion of MPs aged 25-40 was the lowest ever in the 16th Lok Sabha with just 47 members of Parliament belonging to this age bracket.

How can one explain the prevailing state of affairs in Indian politics? Doesn’t this suggest that there is either a leadership vacuum among the youth in the country or the established senior political leaders are not willing to give political space to the youngsters?

You may also like to read

• Top 10 young leaders of India
• Lack of young guns in BJP

The second probability seems more genuine considering that if a candidate up to 40 years of age can fall under the youth category, then the two major political parties – the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress, woefully ignored their stake in the political process. Of the total candidates that they fielded in the fray, the BJP had only 12 per cent and the Congress a marginally higher 14 per cent who belonged to the 25-40 age-group.

Global Politics : Youth Leaders

The world has moved over to younger leadership. Barrack Obama was in his 40s when America chose him as its President. David Cameroon is yet another example, who at 43 rose to become the Prime Minister of Britain.

It is a fact that most political leaders around the world achieve their position in office when they are well in their forties. Yet, many of the world’s best known revolutionary leaders were even younger when they became the rulers – Cuban Fidel Castro was just 33, Mexican Emiliano Zapata, 31, and French Napoleon Bonaparte, 30.  One of our greatest emperors Akbar too was just 14 when he was crowned as the emperor of India!

Consider the age of some of our present Parliamentarians — Ram Sundar Das (Janata Dal United) is 93 years old. LK Advani (BJP) is 86, O. Rajagopal (BJP) is 84, Kabindra Purkayastha (BJP), 82, Bijoy Krishna Handique (Congress), 82, Kallappa Awade(Cong), 82, Satyabrata Mukherjee (BJP), 81, Liladharbhai Vaghela (BJP), 80, Mainkrao H Gavit (Cong), 80 and N.S.V. Chittan (Cong), 80 and Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi (BJP), 80.

Students Union Elections : Getting Murkier

Let’s consider another scenario of students’ union elections in our universities and colleges. Our political parties do have their youth wings actively involved at the college and university levels. Yet, instead of grooming future leaders, they seem to be more interested in introducing styles of expedient politics. Hence, does it surprise anyone when the Congress’s students’ wing, the National Students’ Union of India (NSUI) had a budget of a prince Rs.1.5 crore and its rival, the BJP’s Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), Rs 1 crore, to run their respective campaigns at last year’s Delhi University Student’s Union elections?

A tongue-in-cheek reaction to this could be that this is what we call ‘baptism by fire’. Isn’t it true that criminalisation in student union elections and lack of financial transparency in conducting them had resulted in setting up of the Lyngdoh Committee in 2006? Yet, our political parties, controlled by wily old satraps, have more often than not ignored its recommendations in their quest for power and control.

JP Movement: Rallying Point for Youth

Yet isn’t it true that the largest number of youth leaders that the country produced was during the JP Movement of the ‘70s (led by late Jaya Prakash Narayan who had given a call for ‘Total Revolution’ in the wake of the state of emergency imposed by the then Indira Gandhi-led Congress government). JP did nurture these leaders who have ruled the political firmament of the country – whether it was former Prime Minister Chandrasekhar, present Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Nitish Kumar, Laloo Yadav, Mulayam Singh, George Fernandes … they all have been a product of the JP movement.

They all started young. Yet, can any of them be credited with donning the role of mentoring the next generation of political leaders? Quite a few of them on the contrary, preferred to groom their own children as their successors! Little surprise, therefore, that in the erstwhile United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, though there were about 15 younger ministers, most of them did not really have anything more to flaunt than their political inheritance.

India’s Young Leaders: Products of Dynastic Politics

Indeed, we do have a young breed of politicians yet most represent political dynasties. How many of youngsters are there today who we can call as ‘self-made’ leaders? It does lend credence to the theory of dynastic politics and also suggests power politics is the fiefdom of a select few in our country, who are wary of paving way for young and fresh faces in their domain (A Narendra Modi could be an exception, yet didn’t it take him an entire lifetime to break into their bastion? At 63, he cannot be called young enough).

We still remember the rare case of Asom Gana Parishad – formed by students after the signing of the historic Assam Accord of 1985 by the representatives of the Government of India and the student leaders who for six years had led an agitation against illegal Bangladeshi infiltrators in Assam. The AGP failed to live up to expectations and split despite having formed government twice in Assam from 1985 to 1989 and from 1996 to 2001, yet don’t failed experiments count much?

Youth Leadership in Indian Politics : Future Hope

Yet, as there is a saying, youth trumps age any day of the week! It doesn’t make any sense that someone needs to be groomed to the age of say up to 50 to be considered matured enough to be in electoral politics. Our young bureaucrats have proved time and again that statecraft is not an exclusive domain. Similarly, today the entrepreneurial leaders are considerably younger, with more than half of them being less than 35 years of age.
Recently addressing the scientists at the Defence Research and Development Organisation, Modi asked for more opportunities for  20-25 year old youth, who he said “would do very well in cyber security area”.

Isn’t it time to extend such opportunities to the political field as well in a better and organised way?

Or can we say in jest that politics rather borders on senility? Remember Napoleon Bonaparte’s words: “In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.”