AA Edit | Heed Ground Realities, Deal With Gen Z Priorities Better

The Jantar Mantar agitation may have yielded an immediate result in the form of the resignation of a mighty minister from the Union Cabinet but its reverberations have not yet ceased; in fact, they have only started, shaking the foundations of the thought processes of the political class. Every party is making attempts to connect with the generation which is on a warpath against deep-rooted systemic problems, asking fundamental questions. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s address to the nation on the Independence Day is reflective of this desperate attempt by the Indian politicians to engage with this section of the citizenry.

The Prime Minister has sought to address the Generation Z offering them schemes that would at best pretend to address issues in the conventional manner. Mr Modi has offered to make available free online tuitions for competitive examinations. It is a solution a politician typically offers when he hears that young people are angry that several students committed suicide when the Neet examination for admission to medical courses got cancelled. That those who cannot afford coaching centres again can make use of the government offer would have been the thought the government. This, however, hardly addresses the problem as the students are asking for quality schools which employ quality teachers, something that free online entrance examination coaching can hardly replace. Time the government looked at what is fundamentally wrong with the education system.

Unemployment, too, is staring one of the world’s fastest growing economies, and artificial intelligence is unlikely to help the scene. Economists talk of jobless growth in a country whose Prime Minister often talks of the fact that more than half its population is aged less than 30 and the country is on brink of a harvest of this demographic dividend. Training in AI is not the solution to unemployment but focusing on areas which can generate jobs for the masses is. An honest attempt to understand the ground reality and formulate policies to create more sustainable jobs must be on top of the government’s agenda. There are no ad hoc solutions to a real, live issue. Yet all those seven programmes the Prime Minister offered the Gen Z appear to suffer from this disconnect.

The government has claimed success in eliminating Maoism from the country after setting a deadline of March 31, 2026. Maoists mounted an armed and violent challenge to the country’s institutionalised democracy. But the government refuses to acknowledge the fact that Maoism has thrived due to institutionalised inequality, elimination of which would have cut the roots of all such forces. Instead of addressing it, the government now wants to label those who question government policies as ‘intellectual Naxalites’ and take them on. In this way it believes it can put down not just the streams of thought that militate against a system which sustains itself on institutionalised exploitation but also the political opposition. However, this announcement by the Prime Minister betrays the political bankruptcy of the BJP, instead. Anti-intellectualism has been a hallmark of all fascist regimes; it is for the BJP to decide if it wants its government to turn into one.

The Congress, the principal Opposition party, appears to be equally clueless about the tectonic shift that has of late visited the country’s politics. It has failed to empathise meaningfully with the sentiments that powered the Jantar Mantar agitation; it is yet to demonstrate that it has got wind of the thought process of a generation which asks questions. It thinks it can survive on the privilege and honour of being the Opposition but that is unlikely to work, too.

Verbal solutions are unlikely to gratify the youth, but actions could. So, politicians of all hues would better learn the language of the generation with which they seek to engage.