Suddenly, voting is “cool”

BANGALORE — Last month, 20-year-old Soumya Janardhanan spent hours standing in line, braving the sounds of heated arguments. The reason: She wanted the photo ID card that will allow her to vote in the Indian election that begins April 16.

“Politics is suddenly cool,” said Janardhanan, a bubbly undergraduate at an engineering college in Bangalore who is one of the estimated 200 million Indian voters under the age of 25. Like Janardhanan, half of these young voters will cast their ballots for the first time in this upcoming election.

Until now, “cool” was an unheard-of description for India’s complex politics, which include an alphabet soup of political parties, aging leaders and candidates tainted by crime and corruption. Young educated Indians previously disdained the process, and most didn’t bother to show up at the voting booth.

But young, restless India has been stirred to action by an unprecedented voter participation campaign, which has spread the message on television, YouTube, blogs and Facebook, and even through an Indian rock band’s new composition "Shut Up and Vote."

“For the first time ever, the aspirations of the massive youth population appear to intersect with politics,” said Bangalore-based urban affairs expert Ramesh Ramanathan.

So intense is the crusade that many young people are on the streets canvassing for candidates, and some have even announced their own candidacies. Call center workers in Bangalore, college students in Delhi and Bollywood stars in Mumbai are all inspired. The general desire seems to be for conscientious leaders who will fight poverty and terrorism, and guarantee job security.

“It is a very different level of political engagement by the young, it is a ray of hope,” said Ramanathan, whose organization, Janaagraha, linked with industrial conglomerate Tata to launch a campaign that berated youngsters with this slogan: “If you are not voting, you are asleep.”

Janaagraha’s Web site has received millions of hits, and has helped 500,000 Indians register as new voters.

“Politics will be the new arena where youth can make an impact, it is a challenge,” said Shashank Navalurkar, 21, a college student in Mangalore, on the southwest coast of India.

How India’s youth will shape the election won’t be known for some time. The election is so gigantic an enterprise in terms of logistics, security and sheer size — it will involve 720 million voters, nearly two-and-a-half times the population of the United States — that it will span several weeks until May 13. It will end only when votes are counted and final results declared a couple days later.

But if interviews with young Indians are any indication, these likely voters have clear concerns. The criminal, health and wealth records of political candidates are flying across the Internet, furiously forwarded by irate young citizens.

Janardhanan is livid about the problems she encounters in her south Bangalore neighborhood, such as water shortages, poor sanitation and poverty.

These days, she said, politics is a more common conversation topic among her friends than gossip about Bollywood stars and cricket.

Navalurkar, meanwhile, isn’t interested in griping about the state of affairs. Instead, he wants to be proactive, first by interning at a political party and, eventually, by becoming a politician himself.

“By 2020, India will have young political leaders whose average age will be under 50, and not over 75, as it is now,” Navalurkar predicted.

For Navalurkar, the main issues are terrorism — especially after the gruesome terrorist attacks in Mumbai last November — and the current economic situation.

In Bangalore, 27-year-old Vidya Ravindranath, who works at a communications firm, plans to cast her ballot early, and then go around prodding non-voters with her ink-marked finger. “If every Indian took on the responsibility of vote sensibly, we could change anything,” she said.

For such a young electorate, it is bitter irony that India’s political leaders are positively ancient. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is 76 and a recovering from coronary bypass surgery — he has been named the Congress Party’s next prime ministerial candidate.

The situation is the same for the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, which has as its candidate for prime minister 81-year-old Lal Kishen Advani. Born before the days of television, Advani now blogs and woos voters on Facebook. In addition, he brags about using gadgets such as the iPod and the iPhone.

The exception to the age trend could be the Congress Party’s Rahul Gandhi, a 38-year-old whose father, grandmother and great-grandfather were all prime ministers of India. But Gandhi’s rise is also seen as perpetuating a dynastic rule, another failing common to India’s many political parties.

Although the party hasn’t declared the bespectacled, U.S.-educated Gandhi prime minister material in this election, enlarged digital photographs of him adorn thousands of billboards in the countryside and party workers prostrate before him when he campaigns in villages.

More on GlobalPost dispatches on politics in India:

Taking a bite out of politics

Is India’s election regulator pointless and toothless?

Our crooks are cleaner than yours