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A future divided

Young India holds the key, is what the pandits tell us when asked about what the elections have in store for India.

A future divided


Apoorvanand

Young India holds the key, is what the pandits tell us when asked about what the elections have in store for India. But what is this young India? Is this one monolith or is it constituted of myriad voices and not only diverse but also disconnected layers? Disconnected is also not the appropriate word to understand the extent of divide that has taken place in different sections of the youth of India.

Recently a young student from the University of Delhi told me about his friends who wanted to destroy Brahamanism. I asked him if they were from the OBC or Dalit communities. His answer took me by surprise. They were Thakurs from Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand. The Brahmin-Thakur antagonism of these areas is playing out in a metropolitan setting like Delhi University. Similarly, there was call by the Dalit and OBC students for a bandh recently to protest the 13-point roaster following the recent Supreme Court order in connection with reservation in the appointment on faculty positions. The very next day, a Maharana Pratap dignity rally was held at the university premises. I was told that it was done in the name of asserting nationalism but was actually a response to the protest by the Dalits and OBCs organised the previous day.

The sharp and deep divide between different sections of our population has also affected the youth. It has broken the thread of the feeling of youth which could have created a universal youth. What is sad is that there is hardly a space that these sections of youth share. They have become interest groups, contesting, if not fighting, for their piece of the cake.

In the past five years, new fissures have appeared. My young nephew from Jharkhand told me about a phenomenon which was very new to the state. Mobikes and cars with the stickers of Brahmin and Kshatriya were becoming a common feature in Deoghar. This reassertion of upper-caste identity is also to be seen in Uttar Pradesh and other Hindi heartland states. Last year, on the day of a bandh called by the Dalits, youth from the so-called upper castes attacked the Dalits in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. Hundreds of them had to flee their homes and places and suffer police action against them. It has made them bitter. The upper-caste people resent their return, leave alone the question of facilitating justice for them.

The arrest and long incarceration of Chandrashekhar Azad in Saharanpur was seen as victory by the upper-caste youth. It has further alienated the Dalits. As if this antagonism was not enough, new and numerous divisions have now surfaced between sub-caste groups and are getting sharper. What is the meeting point between a Valmiki youth and a Jatav youth, even when both belong to the larger category called Dalit? When Valmikis demand reservation, it would definitely not be supported by the Jatavs. We can see it quite pronounced in Punjab.

As each of these groups sees the other group’s interest as cutting into its own, there is hardly any possibility of a joint youth struggle. Our electoral politics has introduced an element of cynical calculationism in all of them. There is an understanding that they should negotiate separately with the power which has resources of all kinds at its command. It would not be an exaggeration to say that this competition is never ending.

It can explain the absence of any large-scale mobilisation or protest against withdrawal of the state from higher education or massive unemployment. How is that there is no youth anger against a system which is taking life out of them?

The Muslim youth has been completely marginalised in the national scheme of things. They have seen them being pitched against the nation itself. A feeling of disenfranchisement has gripped them and for them 2019 is a crucial moment. They have been shunned by nearly all political parties which don’t want to be seen with them in the same frame. The assault on the Muslim identity has arrested a process that had started in this religious community some time back. The assertion of the Pasmanda Muslims has now been pushed in the background. 

A perception was created that a separate interest group of Muslim young women has been created which thinks differently than their men counterparts in the name of the state sponsored gender just law to illegalise triple talaq. But there is hardly any evidence to support it.  The eruption of sub-nationalism in the Northeast, especially in Assam with the publication of the National Register of Citizenship and the Citizenship Amendment Bill, has pitted Bengalis against Assamese and also created tension in different tribal groups.

One can see from this description that the imagination of a youth constituency is a fantasy. Can nationalism bridge these divides? Can a nationalist youth be forged out of this fractured Indian youth? Would that do some good to India or would further fragment it?Elections are a way to further and deepen democracy. But they should also create a shared national humanity with some values which diverse groups seek to achieve. If there is no commonality here and if they have no shared dreams then the Indian experiment that had stated 70 years back with the framing of the constitution is bound to fail. To save it, the youth must reclaim the value of solidarity which is enshrined in the constitution as fraternity. 

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