A politics of the young needs to open up and include, speak to new — and old

Is the students’ movement that speaks of education and jobs carving out new common ground and new solidarities, smudging the lines of a divided politics?(Illustration: C R Sasikumar)

Something seems to be changing since the Jantar Mantar sit-in became a movement that forced the Narendra Modi government to listen, and bend. If that change is not just a short-lived excitement that fizzles out before the next election comes, if it is to go beyond the selfie-style vertical videos starring Prime Minister Narendra Modi, or the curated stage of Rahul Gandhi’s “Chhatron ki Goonj” that makes space for his young audience’s stories, or the Instagram duel between Congress and BJP — what would it be? Is there a new politics of the young that will survive, after young protesters’ voices, amplified by social media, have faded?

The question, really, is this: Is the students’ movement that speaks of education and jobs carving out new common ground and new solidarities, smudging the lines of a divided politics?

That question has a back story.

In the journey of a large and diverse nation, two tendencies have coexisted imperfectly — one, that breaks down the whole into its constituent parts, and the other that puts parts together to construct a new whole.

The first effort is necessary so that all the parts feel seen and heard, so that the weaker among them are not shouted down by the dominant, and so that inequalities and injustices are not papered over in the name of an artificial unity. The first-past-the-post electoral system, which offers a powerful incentive for a catch-all politics, makes the second effort — of connecting the dots and adding up — a strategic necessity. But softening the fault-lines and stitching together more enveloping imagined communities is also a political imperative. It addresses the people’s yearning for wider circles of belonging, which sits alongside their need to be acknowledged and addressed separately.

The students’ movement comes after the two grand political projects of the ’90s, Mandal and Mandir, broke down the whole into its parts and then could not put them back together again. At the same time, other attempts to construct new communities have been much too episodic and erratic.

The Mandal project oversaw the splitting of the polity into its constituent castes. In its best version, after applying social justice as balm and corrective, the outcome was to be the putting back together of a more equal society. But the second process was thwarted because the legitimising principle of social justice gave way to a proportional representation arithmetic — “jiski jitni sankhya bhaari…” This meant that castes lines became more impermeable and even when caste groups came together with others in alliances, there was little effort to forge a shared language or common understanding.

In a nation still carrying the scars and silences of Partition, a version of the Mandir project — one that may well have been a retrospective add-on, post-2014, to airbrush an inherently violent and exclusionary story — was about deconstructing a denial. It was to be about acknowledging the unaddressed challenge festering under slogans of “unity in diversity”. This version of the Mandir project could, arguably, have led to a bottom-up reworking of the terms of religious co-existence — from fear, prejudice and violence, to respect, pluralism and diversity. But a Hindutva leadership that sought to inflame and polarise, and the demolition in 1992 of the Babri Masjid, crushed the possibilities, if any were there in the first place, of a rebuilding.

Over the years, attempts have been made to sidestep the hardened lines of Mandal and Mandir, and forge new communities across them, on the basis of ideas that are unifying or overlapping. They recognised that the older mobilisations were exhausted, and that the people, or a section of them, were looking for a way out of a predetermined politics.

In no particular order: Mayawati’s experiments in UP of adding the “plus” vote to her “core” base and Nitish Kumar’s carving out of a breathing space in the middle of a “coalition of extremes” in Bihar. The Aam Aadmi Party’s attempt to construct a politics around the government school and mohalla clinic. Modi 1.0’s tapping into the “aspirational” vote (alongside Hindutva). Prashant Kishor’s pitch that exhorts voters to ask what is best for their children, above all. Vijay’s appeal in Tamil Nadu to a seemingly abstract people, that includes those mobilised by Dravidian politics but is not defined by it.

Each of these attempts has faced, or continues to face, difficult challenges. The experiments of Mayawati and Nitish used the building blocks of caste and added the cement of “bhaichara (brotherhood)” and “sushasan (good governance)”, respectively, to build cross-caste and cross-community alliances. Nitish was much more successful, but his framework has not been able to survive his political exit. Mayawati’s outreach has been beset with an unchecked shrinking that has all but ruled the BSP out of the race after her 2007-2012 heyday in UP.

The AAP’s imaginative model has been weakened by the party’s showboating, by the vindictive targeting of its government and leadership by the BJP, and by a more substantive failure that continues to chase it. Even as AAP sidesteps the old Mandal and Mandir fault-lines, it needs to find new and creative ways of engaging with caste and religious inequalities — else, it runs the risk of a friendly neighbourhood solutionism narrowing its project irretrievably.

Modi’s courting of the aspirational voter on the move has, in his second and third terms, conspicuously taken second place to the BJP’s no-holds-barred bid to conquer-and-occupy and its ideological fixities. Both Prashant Kishor and Vijay are a work in progress — Vijay is the outsider who has broken through while PK is still to widen the Bankipur opening. Both need to establish the contours of the idea that animates their politics — it is not an offspring of the old frameworks, and that is its strength, but if it does not negotiate with them on its own terms, it will be overpowered and defeated by their legacies.

That is also the challenge for the Gen Z movement. It has a new idea and form. It has shown unifying possibilities. But there is work to be done. It needs to find a new language to address the old and resilient issues, be it persisting caste inequalities or shrinking spaces for minorities, economic stress on uneven ground or strains in a federal polity.

If a politics of the young is not to be transient, like youth is, if it is to endure, it needs to find ways of both reimagining the whole and addressing the parts. The youth movement’s idea of the future must open up and include many more — beyond the young.

The writer is national opinion editor, The Indian Express. vandita.mishra@expressindia.com