Youth in Politics - “If you think you can, you are right!”

Its been nearly two months now that in the backdrop of the Mumbai terror attacks, when terror was seen precariously that close, there was lot of talk, anger, frustration among public who felt helpless and violated that they eventually have brought down the leaders and many eminent people have raised concern about how educated youth should come into politics because there is a need for new force.

Politics is undoubtedly the biggest service to the nation. A lot of people believe its dirty, or atleast the people in the system are. So when a person voices his opinion that there needs to be a change in politics, the immediate reaction would be "Why dont you be the change you want to see in the world?"

No matter how badly anyone feels there needs to be a change in our system today, its highly difficult to achieve that. It’s because elections in this country are neither fought with passions and policies nor with candlelight processions. The truth is that Indian politics is not fought with ideology, but with muscle power and ruthless rigging in the interiors. Indian politics is a hierarchy of criminals and goons. At the grassroots, a local MLA wins through a bunch of goons. On top of a few such MLAs sits the MP;and on top of such mostly criminal and corrupt MPs sits the Prime Minister. And that a man sitting as the Prime Minster could be a poet, a literary genius, who knows 17 languages or an economist, but the reality is that he sits there because his party has a hierarchy of criminals; and the stronger this criminalisation is at the grassroots level, the tougher it is to defeat them.

Yet we should be hopeful that one day, the youth will come forward and make the difference... But before clean and honest youth can come forward, we need to give the youth the environment to fight on the basis of policies and passion and not on the basis of guns.

The key takeaway from the assembly election results is that the Indian voter should now place a premium on good governance at the local level as it happened in Delhi. Sheila Dikshit was endorsed yet again because the Delhi voter saw in her a hard-working,committed leader in making the national capital a better place to live in. Shivraj Singh Chauhan and Raman Singh won in their respective states, not because they were seen as Hindutva warriors but because they had shown a certain commitment to welfarist schemes and development programmes.

I hope there is a new vote bank out there, a vote bank of furious and articulate people. It is impossible for any politician to ignore this urban voter and rely on the rural masses alone. 26-11 has ensured that the Indian upper middle class emerge from its cocoon of privilege. The voices being heard at the Gateway of India are slowly gathering momentum. Over the debris of the Taj, the Indian elite may finally be coming of age.