NY Times: “Among the world’s major countries, India has the youngest population, and the oldest leaders. A startling four-decade gap between the median age of India’s people and that of its government officials most recently reared its head with a heavy-handed and widely-maligned crackdown on free speech on the Internet.
History shows us that generations with an exceptionally high youth ratio create political movements that shake up their systems and leave a profound impact on history. America’s baby boomers – the 79 million people born between 1946 and 1964 – led the charge in the civil rights movement and the sexual revolution.
In China, out of the stormy Cultural Revolution emerged the country’s current crop of leaders, who have taken it to remarkable heights of prosperity and power. More recently, in the Arab Spring there is evidence of a strong correlation between the ratio of the population under 25 and the urge to overthrow unresponsive governments.
Whether India will follow the same path may become apparent in the very near future.
There are some signs that the beginnings of India’s own youth revolt are stirring – the “India Against Corruption” protests, which swept Delhi on Sunday, involved a about a thousand protesters, mostly young men, who broke through barricades meant to protect their elder politicians’ homes and battled with the police.
The India Against Corruption political movement unleashes youth disenchantment against the establishment, using new means of communication like Twitter and Facebook as its fuel. Still, it is headed by an iconic 75-year-old Gandhian – call it shades of a youth movement, with the structure of a traditional Indian family.
India now has around 600 million people who are younger than 25, and nearly 70 percent of its 1.2 billion population is under 40. It is an unprecedented demographic condition in the history of modern India, and in absolute numbers it is unprecedented anywhere in the world. It also comes at a time when much of the developed world and China have aging populations.
The country’s median age of 25 is in sharp contrast to the average age of its cabinet ministers, 65, which is a far bigger gap than in any other country – Brazil and China are next with age gaps just under 30 years. In the United States the gap is 23 years, and in Germany it is less than 10.
Beyond the Internet crackdown, there are other disturbing signs that the age and thought gap between the majority of India’s citizens and their aging leaders is stifling India’s teeming youth.
We see this at play when the chairwoman of the National Commission for Women tells women to “be careful about how you dress,” after a young woman was sexually assaulted in public by a group of men in Guwahati.
We see it when a police officer wielding a hockey stick cracks down on Mumbai’s buzzing night life, and is defended by the state’s home minister. We see it in the inability to overhaul the country’s jaded bureaucracy that stifles fresh ideas.
Most tellingly, perhaps, we see it in the lack of political will to open up key sectors of the economy like retail to foreign competition, under the populist pretense of protecting existing jobs. This protectionism is far removed from the economic realities of the past two decades – India has been one of the clear winners of globalization. But as one writer put it, “The decision-makers in the Indian political class are still stuck in the mental framework of the 1970s, which is when they were blooded in politics.””
via Is a Youth Revolution Brewing in India? – NYTimes.com.
