To rebuild youth base, Nitish Kumar heads to campus

“This will be first such interaction by any socialist leader with students after the JP movement in which the student community had played a key role,” said JD(U) general secretary K C Tyagi. “This is the beginning of Nitish’s interaction with students. He will visit universities and colleges in a number of states to connect with the youth.”

The theme of the interaction, “India of My Dreams”, is markedly similar to Modi’s repeated discourses on “Idea of India” in the run-up to the Lok Sabha polls. Indeed, Tyagi said, this is the “India of Nitish’s dreams” vis a vis Modi’s “Idea of India”.

Nitish will deliver a speech about an hour long before opening the floor to students who wish to ask him questions. The routine is much the same as followed by Modi and Rahul in their interactions.

Modi had kicked off his poll campaign in 2014 with an address to students at Delhi’s Sri Ram College of Commerce, where he had spoken at length about the “Gujarat model of development”. Modi also interacted with students of 200 colleges at Delhi’s Thyagraj stadium, sharing ideas for change in India.

In 2015, Rahul held a number of interactions with college students as the party tried to arrest the slide of its support base among the youth.

One of these was at Bengaluru’s Mount Carmel, a campus Indira Gandhi too had visited. This year, Rahul held a major student interaction at Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies in Mumbai. In the past, Rahul has also interacted with students in JNU, even before the sedition controversy.

Such interactions have been known occasionally to cause embarrassment to leaders. At Mount Carmel, for instance, Rahul asked girl students if they thought Modi’s initiatives Swacch Bharat and Make in India were working. Yes, they were, they told him.

For all that, the campus has remained an ideal platform to look for youth support. Nitish’s exercise comes when there is a view in the JD(U) that a loss of connect with students led to a loss of connect with youth in general. According to Census 2011, the last Lok Sabha polls had 149 million first-time voters aged between 18 and 23, which is expected to go up by 2019.

Tyagi said the invitation for the interaction at ITM University came from the chancellor some time ago. “These are students of MBA and engineering, who will be building the India of the future. At a time when we talk of the need to take a counter-narrative to the one being espoused by BJP and RSS, students are a key stakeholder,” Tyagi said.