Seen and heard

These elections have driven home exactly how much of a gap this can create between those who make plans and those who they8217;re planning for. The BJP, for example, is generally believed to have missed a trick when it decided that V.K. Malhotra would have to be its chief ministerial candidate in Delhi. The capital is believed to have seen a big jump in first-time voters, perhaps three million of them. Of course, there would no doubt have been more if the election commission had not tried airing irritating 8220;youth-friendly8221; jingles on FM encouraging people to vote. And, according to a couple of exit polls, they went with the Congress rather than the BJP by a double-digit margin.

Why they did so, however, isn8217;t quite as simple as quick-and-dirty analysis on live TV would have us believe. The idea that Sheila Dikshit somehow turned into a Youth Icon when nobody was looking was played with briefly and then, thankfully, discarded. Subsequently, people have surmised for us that the half-decade between Malhotra, 76, and Dikshit, 71, was crucial; that young people,8220;didn8217;t want to politicise terrorism8221; unlike, say, the 40-pluses?; and really pretty much everything except the possibility that the younger generation prefers undyed hair. And of all the wild surmises thrown out, only one really rings true 8212; that the problem was not Malhotra8217;s age, but the age of the BJP8217;s ideas. Those were, if you will forgive the half-lisped pun, youthless. The BJP has dominated Delhi for decades; under Malhotra and Madan Lal Khurana, it grew rapidly in the 1980s. It hasn8217;t, however, updated the way it spoke to Delhi about itself. Delhi8217;s BJP is still fighting yesterday8217;s battles in today8217;s city: allying with the Akalis to remind people about 1984, hoping that Sahib Singh Verma8217;s son can 8220;deliver8221; Jats in Outer Delhi. Delhi8217;s young voters will have looked at a party that still views their city as the Punjabi khatri refugee town it once was rather than the complex, cosmopolitan, metropolis it is becoming, and rejected it.

That8217;s the crucial difference about younger voters, younger countries: they don8217;t see why certain disagreements become the focus for political squabbling because of history, rather than for any current reason. Consider the Clinton-Obama battle in the US. Some of the open hostility that Obama8217;s devoted young worshippers indulged in against the Clintons8217; 8220;divisiveness8221; was because they simply didn8217;t understand the context: the deeply divided generation that came of age in the 1960s and how the two presidents from that generation 8212; Bush and Clinton 8212; represented two poles of that decade8217;s vicious campus fights. An electorate that grows younger moves on where the political leadership cannot.

Sometimes, when you want to check a hypothesis like this, it8217;s best to go to the smallest, least complicated place it8217;s being tested. Which is, in this case, of course, Mizoram; a state where the new chief minister, Lalthanhawla, explicitly told The Indian Express that the Congress8217; defeat of the former insurgents in the Mizo National Front was because of 8220;young people who were born after the peace accord of 1986 and cast their votes for the first time.8221; Mizoram8217;s younger voters don8217;t care which of their fathers fought which in the 1970s. Participants in those fights didn8217;t get this in time.

India8217;s going through a demographic transition that is unprecedented. No other country has undergone it when it8217;s also had universal suffrage. When the US came close 8212; the bulge being the post-WWII 8220;baby boom8221; 8212; the political effects were striking, from the election of Kennedy onwards. The photograph of JFK8217;s inauguration makes the sudden shift explicit: it is a sea of old-fashioned top-hats with Kennedy alone bareheaded. Perhaps Obama will show up at his inauguration without a tie. It8217;s particularly noticeable how young India is when one returns from abroad: it was depressing, I remember, to be moving from somewhere where I was below the average height to somewhere where I was above the average age.

What does this mean for policy-making, and for the future of our politics? First, don8217;t assume yesterday8217;s battles are familiar. For example, millions vote today, some swinging elections, who don8217;t have a reflexive understanding of the effects of the licence-permit raj. When economic policy is discussed, explain it to them some other way. Second, it8217;s a reminder that long-simmering problems need to be given time to heal, and that history can be rendered irrelevant quicker than we can imagine: this is something that whoever is making Kashmir policy in Delhi, for example, needs to understand.

And for our politics? It needs to continually second-guess itself. More insulated leaderships should be more fearful: and doing this properly requires more than a website. No, BJP, creating lkadvani.in does not make your leader automatically Obama-esque, regardless of how many of your press releases tell us it does. We8217;ve heard a lot about how Rahul Gandhi8217;s handpicked candidates from the Youth Congress have done well this election; perhaps not because they8217;re young 8212; never really a requirement in the Youth Congress 8212; but because they were hand-picked. Somehow those naturally old, conservative institutions, our national parties, need to be projecting ideas of themselves that look tangibly ahead. It8217;s easy to attack Rahul Gandhi, for example, for not being a political natural or for not having the family charisma in sufficient quantity; but until everybody else seems to look ahead as much as he tries to, they8217;re going to be behind.

mihir.sharmaexpressindia.com