While mapping Indian political shifts, it helps to watch the intersection of three matrices—aspiration and anxieties, digital and local, and cultural and material. The binding thread in this maze is the country’s youth, the anchor of the political shift.
Factor this: 66 percent of India’s population is under the age of 35, which combines the bulk of millennials and Gen Z born in the post-Mandal and post-socialistic era. Then consider that 98 percent of the millennial and Gen Z cohorts are active smartphone users who watch mobile videos every day. Keep in mind that internet data consumption is increasing even in rural India. This mix of factors informs the digital citizenry that is in search of a relatable anchor. Thus, while caste, community and ethnic identities matter among young people, their aspirations are mediated more through the prism of material politics, which is beyond the discourses of government jobs and reservations.
Political parties wanting to attract these votes focus on three factors: the ability to reach out to millennials and Gen-Z, speak a language of aspirational politics that resonates with the majority of these cohorts, and project leaders who are relatable across spatial and communitarian divides. It would be interesting to see the relative location of the two big national parties, the BJP and Congress, on this.
For the Congress, while their national organisational and leadership profile is much weaker than BJP, their social media presence has reasonable parity against the ruling party. This is visible from the fact that even when BJP wins elections, it often struggles to maintain a lead in narrative wars—as was evident during the farmers’ protest and the Manipur violence.
What explains this seeming parity in narratives despite the organisational gap? Therein lies the generational vantage point. According to Vaibhav Walia, communications lead in the Congress war room for 2024 polls, the party recently invested a lot in identifying and recruiting digital volunteers. The drive started during the Bharat Jodo and Bharat Jodo Nyay yatras, where a number was provided for interested young people to give a missed call. Having received around 3 lakh calls, the party followed up and designated the selected ones as Nyay Yoddhas. The list was expanded from the list of donors who were approached and assigned responsibility. The party now organises weekly video calls with them, whose narratives are synchronised. Since these volunteers do not have an institutional stake in the party, Walia claims they work spiritedly if they like an assigned narrative. It helps that the median age of these Yoddhas is 28.
However, this social media parity doesn’t easily translate into votes for the Congress for two main reasons. One, unlike the BJP, the Congress is speaking the aspirational language of the pre-reform era in which discourses on reservation and demands like caste census capture the headline. The ground has shifted. A majority of millennials and Gen Z do not get enthused with these narratives. Two, on the relatability of leaders, the gap between the BJP and Congress is huge. Thus, even otherwise popular Congress narratives do not cut ice with intended voters, as was the case during the assembly elections in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, three states dominated by OBCs, where the caste census issue had few takers.
What has changed on the ground is the aspirational mode of new generations, as some recent study visits revealed. For instance, young tribal men and women in the Northeast speak a language of their ethnic identity, but are enthusiastically becoming a part of India’s developmental story. The careerist aspiration of settling in metropolitan cities is ubiquitous.
Similarly, large sections of the Pondra-Khatri Dalits of Sundarban, Rajbangshi and Bagdi in the northern and western part of Bengal seem fascinated with Modi and the BJP, as they find the party and leader more relatable. The same pattern is visible in young people among the so-called tea tribes of Assam and children of refugees settled generations ago in Dandakaranya across Odisha, Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra. Their aspiration of upward mobility is about corporate jobs and petty entrepreneurships; the discourse on reservation is marginal.
Ground reports reveal that the old grammar of politics that the Congress adopts is being peddled by a few caste or community leaders, whose aggressive assertion is leading to a counter mobilisation of the others. For instance, the anchors championing the discourse of reservation beyond the cap of 50 percent and pitch for a wider caste census are emerging mainly among leaders hailing from castes such as the Yadavs in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, and Marathas in Maharashtra. Similarly, the assertive farmers’ protest and demand for guaranteed support prices are seen by several communities in Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh as a ploy by the Jats to recapture power by hiding their caste identity behind the occupational one. Among these communities, the youth aspire to move beyond a pure farmer-centric identity.
We are witnessing a new wave of democracy where the grammar and language of politics has changed. This is aspirational India where anachronistic discourse of a pre-1990 era will alienate the majority, the spirited team of social media volunteers notwithstanding. In this backdrop, the BJP and the Congress are diametrically apart—the former is posturing a futuristic vision, the latter is looking back.
(Views are personal)
(sajjanjnu@gmail.com)
Sajjan Kumar Political analyst associated with PRACCIS, a Delhi-based research institution