Youth and Politics in India-II

This paper aims to uncover the features that make India’s youth politics so distinct from other forms of politics within the country, the kinds of politics young people participate in, and the kinds of young people who participate in it. First, there is a detailed discussion of the various identities that political parties have used for mobilising youth, as well as those that the youth themselves have used as a basis of political mobilisation on their own terms and in their own ways. This report also deals with the dynamics of youth politics to make the argument that it is far more behavioural than ideological. The practice of youth politics, which often operates outside the sphere of formal politics, is not only highly informed by the distinctly youthful traits of restlessness, spontaneity and insecurity, but is also more about participating for the sake of participation itself. Rather than an ideological, policy-focused type of “participation for the fulfilment of a certain goal”,2 participation in youth politics is driven by the desire to experience a sense of action, identity and masculinity, given that India’s youth politics is portrayed in the literature as a male-dominated domain. However, there is evidence that this is beginning to change, as the number of protesters in the weeks following the rape of a 23-year-old medical student in South Delhi on 16 December 2011 had “been roughly half women and half men”.