Can young politician help india

Source: Election Commission of India. Note: Vote shares of parties do not add up to because only seat-winning parties are included in the list. After its big win, BJP also won the Maharashtra state elections. It is now set for a battle with the Trinamool Congress in the national elections. In a first-past-the-post system, where the candidate or party with the highest vote share wins the seat, a swing of a few hundred votes can sometimes affect election results.

Why states that added most young voters are critical for parties. Our analysis shows that political parties can, by concentrating on the top five states that have added the highest number of new voters, potentially increase their chances to win more seats in the Lok Sabha. These states are also among the most populous in India and any party or coalition winning more seats here can form the government at the Centre, as IndiaSpend reported in May Note: Union territories and smaller states that send one or two members to the Lok Sabha have not been considered for this analysis.

Skill development, higher education opportunities and jobs are going to be priority issues from states with highest shares of young population. This trend holds across different geographies—young respondents from Tier II and Tier III towns and cities are closer in their opinions to young peers from the metros than to older people around them.

The analysis shows that age may be acquiring a new salience in politics. The survey covered a sample of 10, respondents of which 4, were millennials, 2, post-millennials and 2, pre-millennials. Millennials refer to those who were born between and Those born after aged 23 years or below are referred to as the post-millennials or Gen Z.

The rest 40 years and above have been classified as pre-millennials. Arguably, opinions about topical events could be considered fleeting and ill-suited to signal long term implications. The age-wise differences in responses are however not just limited to current events. On the question of party identification as well, the youngest cohort of voters is least likely to identify with any party.

This appears counterintuitive when one recalls the wave of youth support that catapulted the BJP to power in and elections. What explains the recent divergence in political opinions across age-groups? Two related factors may be driving this change. First is the ever-increasing reach of digital and social media. Estimates from a report by Kantar , a data consulting firm, suggest that half of the Indian population will have access to the internet in the next few months.

Two-thirds of these users are below the age of The country also has the highest data usage per smartphone per month globally, according to a June report by the telecom giant Ericsson. The Lokniti-CSDS data presented in the accompanying chart suggests that young Indians are the most avid users of various social media platforms.

Taken together with 24x7 media, this means a never-ending news cycle for voters. The impact of the digital news explosion is likely to be felt more by a young audience that has not yet committed firmly to any particular political party or ideology, and has little memory of previous governments.

So even if there were a tendency favoring the BJP in the states where the party has been gaining popularity among young voters, the youth in the other parts of the country will most probably not be part of this equation.

An analysis of policies, programs and manifestos of various political parties suggests that there is no political party which is directly addressing and catering to the youth in India. The parties from the political left marginally attract greater support from the youth for their political agenda, but they have hardly shown any effort in addressing the issues of the youth, with unemployment being the largest concern.

Not only parties have lacked vision, even the youth has not shown a great effort to demand policies that respond to their concerns. Under these circumstances, the youth remains invisible as an electorate that deserves particular attention. This lack of addressing the youth in politics may backfire, as the fear persists that many of the young citizens may be reluctant to cast their vote in the upcoming elections.

There is evidence that in the national and state elections since , the voter turnout of the youth has been around 5 per cent less than that of older age groups. One could assume that the youth in India may feel alienated towards their political leaders, who at an average age of 65 years are the oldest policy makers in the world.

But even the young politicians in India fail to convey a motivating message to the young citizens to come out in bigger numbers to vote: A study was conducted in select constituencies where a young politician between age either got elected into parliament or ran for elections in The outcome suggests that even in constituencies with younger politicians, the voter turnout of youths is equally limited. The two major national parties, the Congress and the BJP, both show positive effort to put forward younger candidates in the next elections, however this will have very limited impact on the voter participation of the youth as none of these parties address the issues related to youth.

With family ties representing a common entry ticket for many young MPs into politics, and the widespread fatigue among Indians towards this dynastic inheritance of power with the most prominent example being the Nehru-Gandhi family , it may not seem surprising that young politicians are unable to reach out to the youth; According to a study by Patrick French in , out of the 38 youngest MPs in the Lok Sabha, 35 have entered politics through the help of relatives.

The parties who are now developing their strategies to mobilize the youth are most likely to fail in their approach. The average Indian has multiple identities of caste, class, region and religion, besides the identifying factors of gender and age. These identities of the average Indian voter are usually predominant and outshine the other identities. In the case of young Indians, this means a division of the youth over their class and caste identities, rather than feeling united on the basis of age and the issues which concern them in particular.

The data from a detailed research conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies CSDS over the last years has indicated that the gender and age identity of Indian voters, including the youth, is very weak.