Enter The Chhote Sarkar

Preliminary findings of a study on ‘Youth in Indian Politics’, conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in collaboration with Konard Adenaur Stiftung, explain the disconnect politicians have with the young in India. The main finding of the study, exclusive to Outlook and to be published in February 2012, is that hardly any of the young members of the present house has made a difference in their constituency. Here are some other generation gaps:

Young MPs

• Voters: Old or young, they both prefer younger candidates
• Politicians: The proportion of young MPs has been falling: young MPs in 2009 are lesser than those elected in 2004 and even 1999

Route to enter Politics

• Voters: The young voters want their candidates to take a competitive route to get into politics
• Politicians: Sixty per cent of the 79 ‘under-40’ MPs in the current Lok Sabha are from political families

Voter Turnout

• Voters: Participation of youth in poll-related activities going up, but they’re voting in lesser numbers. That should change.
• Politicians: Older people participating less in poll-related activities, but voting more than the youth

Participation of youth in politics

• Voters: Even more participation in political activities; it’s higher than about a decade ago
• Politicians: Political parties not interested in giving tickets to young candidates. The current Lok Sabha is the third oldest house ever.

Politics as career

• Voters: At least 25 per cent of youth interested in making politics their career.
• Politicians: First-time MPs in Congress in the current Lok Sabha is 15; in BJP 8 and Samajwadi Party, 2.

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For three days in a week, Ajay Kumar, Jharkhand Vikas Morcha (Prajatantrik) Member of Parliament, is a corporate honcho in Delhi’s Okhla Industrial Area, nattily dressed in business suits, brokering business deals over video-conference calls with business partners across the world. On the fourth day, though, after a night-long train journey back to his constituency Jamshedpur, he trades the business suit for an ordinary cotton shirt and trousers, and a Nehru jacket for a touch of politics.

This is the new young politician. He may not be on national TV every night, but he is doing the right thing where it matters, his constituency. And Kumar is always in a hurry, it takes weeks to pin him down for an interview. Kumar got elected in a bypoll only in July this year, giving him just over two years before the frenzy of the 2014 Lok Sabha polls strikes home. He is busy trying to crack the code for the real test ahead. “Sixty per cent of the people in my constituency are young. They hate the politics of privilege. They speak and understand the modern language of opportunities, of a level-playing field. I don’t think seasoned politicians understand that,” he says. Kumar is 48, but in a Union cabinet where the average age is above 60, that is young.

In Jamshedpur, Kumar jogs every morning through crowds of youth to keep a tab on the pulse of his voters. It’s on these morning runs through Jubilee Park that young voters approach him to discuss issues that concern them. His team in the MP office is carefully chosen, all below 35. There is an IIM Ahmedabad graduate looking after solar projects, a media professional focusing on possible corporate investments in his constituency, a young lawyer looking into rtis and police follow-ups of voters’ cases, and an XLRI graduate overseeing Kumar’s health initiatives. “The catchwords for the young today are healthcare, education, employment and integrity,” he says. So he is putting his nose to the grind. A tie-up with the Indian Medical Association (IMA) has ensured that the treatment of one patient a day is funded by any one hospital in the city. He has started a call centre for free treatment of health emergencies, employing 50 people to look after the ailing in his area. That done, he has moved on to a solar lighting project to provide power to distant villages. “We’ve done 10 villages, and 50 more villages are being funded by a Bangalore corporate,” he says.

Teach aid Ashok Tanwar, Sirsa MP, is revolutionising education through his K-Yans. (Photograph by Jitender Gupta)

It’s exactly this hunger for change among the young that 35-year-old Ashok Tanwar, Congress MP from Sirsa, is trying to tap. A first-timer, Tanwar is valued as much for being a Dalit as for his JNU background in the party. His focus area is educating children in rural areas. To check early dropouts, Tanwar is making education fun for these primary school kids in Sirsa with K-Yans, short for Knowledge Yantra, a first-of-its-kind teaching tool based on an integrated computer-cum-projector device which uses animation to teach English, Science and Maths to students from Class I to V. Ten machines at a cost of Rs 22.50 lakh were donated from his MPLADS fund in November last year. Another 16, one in each assembly constituency, followed right after, and the state education department will soon be funding another 40.

The youth are another important ingredient in Tanwar’s politics. And he’s trying to reach them through sports development. Tanwar set up Village Community Sports Pools by donating sports kits. “I tell them work hard and we will fund your training at the national level. Haryana has a natural talent for sports. We can make a difference in national and international sports,” he says.

Political commentator Yogendra Yadav says leaders like Tanwar are the way forward in Indian politics. “These are our national heroes. Politics today needs to address the issues of the youth. There is a need to bring in new symbols, new metaphors and new issues to the fore. And those symbols are education, employment, health. New politics is about that.”

Green warrior Saroj Pandey, first-time MP from Durg, is facilitating green bucks. (Photograph by Tribhuvan Tiwari)

It’s this “new politics” that 43-year-old Saroj Pandey, a first-term BJP MP from Durg, is practising as well. An innocuous SMS from a teenager in Bhilai, urging Saroj to look into the environmental degradation of the area, prompted her to think differently. “Early last year,” she says, recounting the incident, “a student in Bhilai sent me a message on my mobile saying I must green the Budai-Rasmarh-Najpura industrial area. He said you already have 65 factories there, how many more do you need? Get us trees.” Over months, Saroj worked hard with the state authorities to procure 100 acres of industrial land. On July 4, 2010, she invited the student who had sent her the SMS to participate in a plantation drive. She managed to plant over one lakh trees in the industrial belt. “Today, it looks like a mini forest, with many of the trees as high as 10 feet. It looks beautiful,” says Saroj. Not just that, she even used the new forest to generate employment for the women in the area: “We tied up with the forest department, and using NREGA, gave the charge of maintaining that forest to local women.” The plan was simple: Rs 1 for each tree. Women were divided into groups of 10 to take care of 10,000 trees per group. Today, one group earns Rs 10,000 through the trees every month. “Not a single tree that we had planted has died and the village women have found themselves work,” says Saroj proudly.

‘Woman power’ is also what 43-year-old Tsetan Namgyal, an independent mla from Nubra in Ladakh, has used to change the economy of village households. Nestled in the cold Himalayan desert, sharing borders with China and Pakistan, Namgyal’s constituency of 18,000 people had little means and methods for livelihood. While farming remained the main source of income in the area, the only job available for the men in the villages of Nubra was that of porters with the Indian army, working in the distant and cold Siachen glacier. Namgyal, a local resident of Kirit village, was privy to the food processing skills of the local women. In 2010, he got a group of women in Chamshen village to organise themselves in a women’s self-help group, processing fruit from the area into juice and jams which would be bottled and packaged in Leh. In late 2010, he convinced an Australian company to donate Rs 11 lakh to the Chamshen women to put together machines required to make their jobs easier. A food packaging and bottling licence is now on the way to help the women package and sell their own produce instead of catering to Leh-based companies like Leh Berry now. “It should be done soon, we are almost there,” says Namgyal. “No one comes to you with information on government schemes, welfare measures. You have to struggle yourself.”

Training ground Hathras MP Sarika is reaching education where it’s needed. (Photograph by Jitender Gupta)

That’s true for 31-year-old Sarika Devendra Singh Baghel, a Dalit parliamentarian. A first-time MP from Hathras, a reserved seat in UP, Baghel’s inspiration to join politics has been her maternal grandfather. With a constituency of 18 lakh and almost 30 per cent young voters, RLD’s Baghel realises the importance of wooing them. “The young want education, and if you can’t address that, then it’s a waste,” says Baghel, daughter of a school teacher. The main problem in her constituency was that girls managed to study only up to a certain level because they are not allowed to go out long distances to study; villages had only primary-level schools. And early this year, passenger trains that stopped at Thairiya, 30 km from Hathras, suddenly dropped this railway station from its list of halts. Girls from about 25 villages around Thairiya who would take the passenger trains to Hathras to study stopped coming. Baghel took matters in her hands, and organised funds for a bus for the students to ferry them from Thairiya to Hathras. “Hopefully, the girls will be going back to school soon. But this is a temporary solution, the challenge is to find a permanent solution.” It may be a small move, but her constituents admired her for facing up to a new challenge.

Investing energy Harish Choudhary has got Barmer its first degree engineering college. (Photograph by Jitender Gupta)

Challenge is a word that 41-year-old Congress MP Harish Choudhary from Barmer, another first-timer, uses most often in his conversation. Hardly surprising since his constituency in Rajasthan is actually the size of Haryana. “With a booming economy, people’s expectations and aspirations have gone up and so have the challenges. People look for inclusive growth now,” he says. With energy resource production based on solar, wind, coal and crude oil a major factor in his constituency, Choudhary has roped in various corporates and forged tie-ups with foreign oil companies to train young students in skill development. He has also finally managed to get Barmer its first degree engineering college, sanctioned in May this year; it’s expected to start admissions in the next two years. “We didn’t have any professional colleges here,” he says. “A medical college is still a dream, but at least aspiring engineers have some hope now,” he says.

It’s this politics of hope throbbing in rural India, away from the razzmatazz of the metros, that needs to become the defining image of our times. As Pushpesh Pant, a political scientist from JNU, puts it, “The problem seems to be that most of us focus only on celebrity politician-scions of dynasties. There is a disconnect between the present leaders and their ‘young’ followers. Politicians will have to rediscover a new medium to inspire young constituents. The present generation has no shared memories of struggles or achievements. In these circumstances, the political response cannot be monolithic.” The answer, perhaps, lies somewhere here. For, in the end, the views of the young not only reflect the hopes and contradictions of its own age but also the ambitions of a nation that’s decided its time has come.