Catch them young: Modi eyeing 133 million first-time voters for 2019 polls

In 2019, first-time voters in India will be twice the size of France's population

This year, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi delivered his shortest Independence Day speech from the ramparts of the Red Fort, it might have been directed to a generation whose attention span is shorter and lifespan longer than its predecessor. His eye might have been set on those born from 1997 to 2001: In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, they will be exercising their voting rights for the first time in a parliamentary election.
 
“January 1, 2018, will not be an ordinary day – those born in this century will start turning 18. For these people, this is a decisive year of their lives. They are going to be the creators of the destiny of our nation in the 21st century. I heartily welcome all these youth, honour them and offer my respects to them. You have an opportunity to shape the destiny of our country,” Modi said.

 
In many ways, Modi was addressing an important electoral constituency that also has the power to shape his party’s destiny: In the 2019 polls, 133 million young adults will get to cast their vote – 70 million young men and 63 million young women. Of them, 73% live in India’s villages. The number of young women in rural India who will be eligible to exercise their franchise in 2019 alone equals the population of Spain. The number of young men who will cast their vote for the first time in 2019 is higher than the population of Britain.
 

India’s demographic dividend might have peaked, but for India’s political parties, an electoral dividend is there for the taking if they can play it right. And that might not be hard for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has barely taken a wrong step since storming to power in 2014. An estimated 150 million new voters had become eligible to vote in 2014 – the highest ever reported in the history of free India. The results of that year’s general elections, overwhelmingly in BJP’s favour, seemed to show that these voters were swayed by the personality cult of Modi, who rode high on promises of “better days” if his party was voted to power.

 

“There has been an upswing in the number of such voters since 2004. For these idealistic first-time voters, a strong leader promising better opportunities is the preferred choice. This was evident in 2014 and this trend will continue in 2019,” says Sanjay Kumar, director, Centre for Study of Developing Societies.
 
This is where Modi’s address to first-time voters in his Independence Day speech assumes significance. Not all of them were primed to enter the workforce by leveraging their education. Census figures from 2011 show that 87 per cent of those who were aged 10 years at that time were enrolled for receiving primary education. These are the young adults who, by virtue of turning 18 in 2019, would cast their vote for the first time in the next Lok Sabha polls.

 
Then there are those who were aged 14 years in 2011. Only half the number of children in this age group were in middle school in 2011. Like their 10-year-old counterparts, these 22-year-old adults would also get to vote in a parliamentary election for the first time in 2019. Almost 43% of this age group was without any formal education, although classified as literate. Invariably, a large proportion of this voter base will enter the workforce without ever going to college. In India, as a 10-year-old gets older, there is a greater chance that they will drop out of the formal education sector and join the informal economy.

 
A significant proportion of these first-time voters had started working as agriculture labourers, household workers and cultivators when they were as young as 5 years old. For instance, in 2011, the number of 10-year-olds working as labourers in fields and homes was less than a million. However, the number of 14-year-olds employed as labourers in these areas was almost 2.5 million. People in both these age groups will cast their votes for the first time in 2019.
 
Clearly, for these young adults who cannot rely on an educational qualification to bag jobs, the vision of a better life as given by a leader could sway their political choices. The Modi administration’s sales pitch seems geared to peddle these dreams to this underprivileged workforce. As he has done in the past, Modi’s Independence Day speech was peppered with references to “80 million collateral-free loans to the youth for self-employment”, “millions of youth becoming self-dependent under the PM Mudra Scheme” and “youth should get employment and be able to provide employment”.

 
This is also where Sanjay Kumar’s near-prophetic analysis before the last general elections in India still hold true. Writing for Heinrich Böll Stiftung, a Delhi-based German think-tank, Kumar had said: “The parties from the political left marginally attract greater support from the youth for their political agenda, but they have hardly shown any effort in addressing the issues of the youth, with unemployment being the largest concern. Not only have parties lacked vision, even the youth has not shown a great effort to demand policies that respond to their concerns. Under these circumstances, the youth remains invisible as an electorate that deserves particular attention.”

 
While Modi seemed to have deciphered the writing on the wall, his party’s principal political opponents still seem to be stuttering and scrambling in the dark.