BY CHARMY HARIKRISHNAN, ET
BUREAU | APR 23, 2017, 06.22 AM IST
On a warm summer evening, Ruchika Goswami steps out of a
South Delhi mall after a quick shopping. The 19-year-old Delhi University
student has darted out of a Forever 21 store and snagged a couple of pieces
from H & M. It is a Thursday and the mall is in a weekday stupor. She holds
another shopping bag from Happily Unmarried. Would she want to get married,
someday? Yes, she says with a laugh. Love marriage or arranged marriage? Love
marriage. Does she think a woman should work after marriage . Of course, says Goswami, who is in the first year
of bachelor’s degree in biological science. Should a woman listen to her
husband? Not at all, she says firmly, as dusk falls over the mall and the trees
glow under the lamps. Does she think there should be reservation in colleges
for Scheduled Caste/ Scheduled Tribe students? No, there should be equal
opportunity for everyone.
Goswami, who is from Nainital, lives with her
cousins, Monika and Suman, and watches movies once in a while with them.
But there are films that hurt religious sentiments. Should they be banned? No,
she shakes her head. Does she eat out? She is a health freak, her cousin Suman
pitches in, and doesn’t go to restaurants. Is she a vegetarian? Of course, not.
Should beef be banned? Certainly, she says. And her cousins agree. “Cow is like
our god. It should not be killed.”
That very morning, just 10 kilometres away, in Lajpat Nagar,
Bharathi Janardhanan was almost done cooking and cleaning a house. She works in
five houses, and there were two more to go that day. Do men make better leaders
than women? No, of course not, says the 21-year-old, wearing a golden-yellow
kurta, her hair in a braid. Should women work after marriage? “Of course. I
make over Rs 12,000 every month — and that is important,” says Janardhanan, who
had to stop studying after Class V.
Will
she get married? Maybe after a year. Will it be a love marriage or arranged
marriage? Arranged marriage, of course, says Janardhanan, who is from
Viluppuram in Tamil Nadu and has been living with her parents in Delhi for
about a decade now. She keeps a vrat on Thursdays and Fridays when she won’t
eat non-vegetarian food even though she would cook it for others. Should beef
be banned? Yes, she says, although her family enjoys beef for their Sunday
lunch. Her objection is not due to religious reasons. No animal, she says,
should be killed for food. She is not into watching films, but should they be
censored or banned? Yes, if they hurt religious sentiments. She hasn’t seen the
inside of the mall Goswami shops at. Instead, she occasionally goes to the
market in Bhogal. She hardly eats out but often buys her favourite momos. Has
she ever felt discriminated against? No, she says and she presses the elevator
button to go down and rush to the next house.
But there was that one time when the owner of the building
stopped her from taking the lift and insisted that she takes the stairs to the
third floor. She shrugged it off and had pressed the elevator button. Then as
well as now.
Double Helix of Modernity and Tradition
The Indian youth is complex, many-layered,
varied, often carrying the remains of the past and clinging to traditions, and
yet forging ahead, pressing elevator buttons, breaking a few old rules, and
making new ones. To find what the Indian youth thinks, the Centre for the Study
of Developing Societies (CSDS) in Delhi, along with the German political
foundation Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, conducted an exhaustive Youth Survey — a
sample survey of 6,122 respondents aged between 15 and 34 years across 19
states in April-May 2016. They put to them about 80 questions, including the
ones posed to Goswami and Janardhanan. The report, “Attitudes, Anxieties and
Aspirations of India’s Youth: Changing Patterns”, has just been published.
Janardhanan
and Goswami are two of the over 422 million youth in India — about one-third of
the population. Most of them carry the double helix of modernity and
traditions. “Only a few are very liberal (14%) and very conservative (11%),”
says Sanjay Kumar, director of CSDS and principal investigator of the sample
survey. About 75% of them fall in between — 38% are somewhat liberal and 37%
are somewhat conservative.
Suhas Palshikar, political scientist and director of Lokniti,
who was an adviser to the survey, says: “The crucial takeaway is the internal
differentiations within the category called ‘youth’ — there is only a sketchy
existence of the mythical youth as a homogenous category.” Youth in India, he
adds, is both different from youth in the advanced societies of the industrial
world and, at the same time, different from the older generation of Indians.
“The youth is different from that in the industrial world in the sense that it
has not yet fully gone through the process of individuation — it retains family
and community ties — but it is different from the previous generation/s in the
hope, expectations and aspirations that mark India’s youth of today”.
The youth are political and religious. They are tied to
family and community even as they gradually, although not fully, become more
accepting of other castes and communities. The survey shatters the myth that
the Indian youth is not political.
While 48% of the youth (18 to 34 years) say they
are not interested in politics, 51% say they do — which is 14 percentage points
more than in 1996 (only 37% of 18-34-year-olds showed interest in politics,
according to a CSDS National Election Survey, or NES). It also shows that
the BJP is the most preferred single party. With just 4% of Hindu upper caste,
7% of Hindu OBC and 10% of Dalit youth identifying with the Congress, the Grand
Old Party’s failure to capture the imagination of the youth of the majority
community seems rather complete. If it is not BJP, they are looking at regional
parties.
The survey also confirms the suspicion that the Indian youth
are more into religious activities than they were a couple of years ago. (For
comparison with the NES of previous years, figures here are for
18-34-yearolds.) About 79% pray regularly or occasionally as compared with 73%
in 2009 and in 2014. About 68% go to places of worship regularly or
occasionally as opposed to 52% in 2009 and 56% in 2014. Which raises the
question whether a right-wing government at the Centre since 2014 has led to a
resurgence of religion and a greater assertion of religious identity.
The pull of the family too cannot be wished away
when 65% live with parents. About 84% of married youth have had an arranged
marriage.
Young & Illiberal
Meanwhile, women are asserting their rights in
spite of restrictions. When 51% of married men say that women should not work
after marriage, 54% of married women disagree with it and say women should
work. The ghare-baire notions of women’s freedom are still prevalent. While
only 37% of youth agree, fully or somewhat, that girls should not wear jeans,
and 38% agree that higher education is more important for boys than girls, it
becomes harder for women inside homes and in marriages: 55% of men agree, fully
or somewhat, that women should listen to their husbands, while 46% women
disagree with it.
Albeena Shakil, assistant professor at Jindal
Global Law School, says, “The women’s movement in India has largely been
engaged in confronting/reforming customary practices — dowry, sati, ‘honour’
crimes, son preference, triple talaq, etc, which are all steeped in
kinship-based community beliefs and customs. The survey indicates that while
there is relatively greater acceptance of women’s participation in education or
work (public realm), domestic equations are still more heavily tilted towards
customary roles.”
When it comes to issues like homosexuality and consumption of
beef, the youth tend to be even more illiberal. Only about 25% approve of a
homosexual relationship, with the majority either disapproving of it or
refusing to comment on it. Should the attitudes of the youth define what the
government’s policy should be on an issue? Shashi Tharoor, MP, who sought to
introduce a Private Member’s Bill seeking to amend Section 377 of the Indian
Penal Code that criminalises homosexuality, says: “I believe that we need to
move India into a more liberal direction, in keeping with the values enshrined
in the Constitution.
India’s young are not conservative, they’re
confused — and their attitudes reflect to a great extent what they are told
they ought to believe.” At the dawn of 1947 India would have been even more
conservative. What is the significance of having a liberal leadership for a
rather illiberal society? “A liberal leadership sets aspirational standards for
the nation and teaches society to share those aspirations. Nehru and his
generation of nationalist leaders used the political platform to educate and
exhort; today most leaders prefer to pander to the prejudices of their voters
rather than to raise the bar for them,” says Tharoor.
The CSDS-KAS survey was conducted seven-eight
months after Mohammed Akhlaq was killed in Dadri on the mere suspicion of
having beef stored in his fridge. Even so, only 36% of respondents believe that
eating beef is a personal choice and should not be objected to. The responses
on the basis of religion and region show how divergent the views are. While 69%
of Muslims think consumption of beef is a personal choice and shouldn’t be
objected to, only 31% of Hindus think so.
A
state-wise study is even more revealing: in Kerala, where a plate of beef and
parotta often passes for staple food, 88% agree, fully or somewhat, that eating
beef is a personal choice. However, in Madhya Pradesh, only 8% agree with that.
In Haryana, 77% disagree, fully or somewhat, with the statement that eating
beef is a personal choice.
And yet
the Malayalis’ support for beef seems a preference for a food that they are
used to and have enjoyed rather than a sweeping liberal stand. When asked
whether films that hurt religious sentiments should be banned, 67% in Kerala
agreed, fully or somewhat. In Delhi, it was 68%. In Assam and Tamil Nadu, it
went as high as 79%. In Bengal, only 30% said films should be banned, but that
doesn’t mean they disagreed strongly with it. Only 23% opposed a ban, while 48%
went for the comfortable hush of No Opinion.
How significant is the fact that India’s youth are mostly
con-libs or conservative-liberals, conservative in certain issues and liberal
in some others? Palshikar says this shows the inadequacy of these categories
and their straightforward application to Indian context. “But it is possible
that the Indian youth is increasingly trapped in the dualisms of contradictory
nature. This contradiction will determine the social and political fabric of
our society in the next quarter of a century if age does not make a difference
and the same attitudes are held by the present generation of youth later in
life. There is not enough research on stability of views across age groups.”
India is a young country — and democracy is a
work in progress. It was just 100 years ago that Mahatma Gandhi walked into the
indigo fields of Champaran and the misery of its farmers. The CSDS survey
report says that while the youth are “modern in their appearance and
consumption patterns”, their views reflect “a troubling inclination towards
intolerance and conservatism”. However, sociologist Dipankar Gupta says: “I see
the glass as half full, and it is filling up. Only 49% support capital punishment
— which means that without any propaganda, about 51% youngsters in India are
against death penalty. Over 80% of Indian youth are okay with people from
another caste as their neighbours. If I am not mistaken, the writer Salman
Rushdie once said that the true metropolitan experience is one where you cannot
decide who your neighbour is going to be. If 81% of India is moving there, I
see that as an important, positive development.”
About 25% of Indian youth may be checking
Facebook daily, but the Indian youth is certainly not your carefully curated
Friends list.
No comments:
Post a Comment