With over 800 million people eligible to go to the polls, India is in the midst of what has been called "the biggest voting event in the world". From April 7th to May 12th, voters will have a chance to choose the next Indian Prime Minister among the three leading candidates—Rahul Gandhi, Arvind Kejriwal, and Narendra Modi—or even to vote "none of the above".
The elections occur over the course of six weeks, cycling through the country in nine phases. This cycle has been notable for the recognition of a "third sex" by the Election Commission of India, allowing transgendered voters to register as neither female nor male if they chose. It has also been notable for an increase in the number of voters who are aged 18 to 19. According to the Election Commission, the percentage of voters in this age demographic rose from 0.75 percent of the total voting population in 2009 to 2.88 percent in 2014; 150 million youth aged 18 to 23 will be eligible to vote for the first time. This has brought issues such as youth unemployment, economic growth and job creation, as well as women's rights and corruption some of the most focused-on issues of this campaign.
It has also meant that for the first time, Indian politicians are reaching out through social media to youth voters. Narendra Modi, representing the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has been at the forefront of this push, with Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ pages as well as a campaign website, and famously posted a selfie on Twitter after he had cast his own vote. Although from reports he seems to not yet be a natural at social media, his efforts made him the most popular Indian politician on Twitter as of July 2013. ""Now no serious politician is seen as being able to avoid social media altogether," Congress government minister Shashi Tharoor said to BBC News. Tharoor was the previously most popular Indian politician on Twitter.
However, Modi's main rival, Rahul Gandhi, who is vice president of the Congress Party, does not even have a website, let alone any social media accounts. This may be a strategy to endear him to a certain segment of India's population—a skeptical segment that sees social media as a tool of only the elite, while large swaths of India's rural population has no access to the internet (in 2012, only 12.6 percent of Indians had an internet connection) and can be largely illiterate.
However, over half of India's population owns a mobile phone of some kind, and increasingly those phones are smartphones. For those without internet access, both BJP and Congress have been using a strategy based on text messaging to mobile phones; smartphone users are able to receive messages through Facebook-owned platform WhatsApp. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and BJP have both been noted for their use of missed calls—where a caller allows the line to ring only once, notifying the other party that they would like a call back, making the call free for the original caller—as a means of polling as well as recruiting campaign volunteers.
The Aam Aadmi Party, which translates to the "Common Man Party", was supposed to lead the charge against anti-corruption in this election. Leading Indian anti-corruption activist Arvind Kejriwal made his political debut on a long wave of anti-corruption protests in December 2013, when his party won 28 seats in Delhi's state assembly and he secured the post of the capital city's chief minister. But his success was short-lived: he was only in office for 49 days before resigning after opposition politicians refused to pass an anti-corruption bill. While some saw his actions as a principled stand, many youth voters passionate about the anti-corruption campaign became disillusioned with the rapid collapse of his government.
This leads to perhaps the most interesting part of the 2014 elections: Indian youth are no longer beholden to any one party. In the past, voters would often vote along ethnic or religious lines; in rural areas they might be directed who to vote for by a village elder. This contributed to the Congress Party's long rule, as the dominant party in India's political scene for most of its modern history as a democracy. But now, as youth increasingly move to cities and find themselves in clashing networks of opinions—both online and in real life—they are far more concerned about the issues than the party name.
“I am impatient. Some days I feel that our old-style politics and politicians will never change, but then there are days when I feel there is still some hope for India,” said graduate student Tavleen Kohli, 22, to The Washington Post. "Jobs are important for me, but so is clean politics."
These urbanized youth make up only a small portion of the electorate—70 percent of India's voters are still in rural areas where traditional ideas about parties still reign. It is yet to be seen how the youth vote will affect India's democracy going forward.
Video: John Oliver discusses the 2014 Indian elections.
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Video Wednesday: Youth Shift the Message and Tactics of Indian Elections
April 30, 2014
With over 800 million people eligible to go to the polls, India is in the midst of what has been called "the biggest voting event in the world". From April 7th to May 12th, voters will have a chance to choose the next Indian Prime Minister among the three leading candidates—Rahul Gandhi, Arvind Kejriwal, and Narendra Modi—or even to vote "none of the above".
The elections occur over the course of six weeks, cycling through the country in nine phases. This cycle has been notable for the recognition of a "third sex" by the Election Commission of India, allowing transgendered voters to register as neither female nor male if they chose. It has also been notable for an increase in the number of voters who are aged 18 to 19. According to the Election Commission, the percentage of voters in this age demographic rose from 0.75 percent of the total voting population in 2009 to 2.88 percent in 2014; 150 million youth aged 18 to 23 will be eligible to vote for the first time. This has brought issues such as youth unemployment, economic growth and job creation, as well as women's rights and corruption some of the most focused-on issues of this campaign.
It has also meant that for the first time, Indian politicians are reaching out through social media to youth voters. Narendra Modi, representing the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has been at the forefront of this push, with Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ pages as well as a campaign website, and famously posted a selfie on Twitter after he had cast his own vote. Although from reports he seems to not yet be a natural at social media, his efforts made him the most popular Indian politician on Twitter as of July 2013. ""Now no serious politician is seen as being able to avoid social media altogether," Congress government minister Shashi Tharoor said to BBC News. Tharoor was the previously most popular Indian politician on Twitter.
However, Modi's main rival, Rahul Gandhi, who is vice president of the Congress Party, does not even have a website, let alone any social media accounts. This may be a strategy to endear him to a certain segment of India's population—a skeptical segment that sees social media as a tool of only the elite, while large swaths of India's rural population has no access to the internet (in 2012, only 12.6 percent of Indians had an internet connection) and can be largely illiterate.
However, over half of India's population owns a mobile phone of some kind, and increasingly those phones are smartphones. For those without internet access, both BJP and Congress have been using a strategy based on text messaging to mobile phones; smartphone users are able to receive messages through Facebook-owned platform WhatsApp. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and BJP have both been noted for their use of missed calls—where a caller allows the line to ring only once, notifying the other party that they would like a call back, making the call free for the original caller—as a means of polling as well as recruiting campaign volunteers.
The Aam Aadmi Party, which translates to the "Common Man Party", was supposed to lead the charge against anti-corruption in this election. Leading Indian anti-corruption activist Arvind Kejriwal made his political debut on a long wave of anti-corruption protests in December 2013, when his party won 28 seats in Delhi's state assembly and he secured the post of the capital city's chief minister. But his success was short-lived: he was only in office for 49 days before resigning after opposition politicians refused to pass an anti-corruption bill. While some saw his actions as a principled stand, many youth voters passionate about the anti-corruption campaign became disillusioned with the rapid collapse of his government.
This leads to perhaps the most interesting part of the 2014 elections: Indian youth are no longer beholden to any one party. In the past, voters would often vote along ethnic or religious lines; in rural areas they might be directed who to vote for by a village elder. This contributed to the Congress Party's long rule, as the dominant party in India's political scene for most of its modern history as a democracy. But now, as youth increasingly move to cities and find themselves in clashing networks of opinions—both online and in real life—they are far more concerned about the issues than the party name.
“I am impatient. Some days I feel that our old-style politics and politicians will never change, but then there are days when I feel there is still some hope for India,” said graduate student Tavleen Kohli, 22, to The Washington Post. "Jobs are important for me, but so is clean politics."
These urbanized youth make up only a small portion of the electorate—70 percent of India's voters are still in rural areas where traditional ideas about parties still reign. It is yet to be seen how the youth vote will affect India's democracy going forward.
Video: John Oliver discusses the 2014 Indian elections.
