Restive youth and the coming angst storm

Most Indians were led to believe that Donald Trump was Prime Minister Modi’s bestie, but the US president has turned out to be a frenemy. How fast have the wheels come apart! Trump’s punishing H1-B visa fee has hammered the final nail in the coffin of Indian STEM-ers. An era of aspiration now appears to have disappeared, perhaps forever. Yet, even in this situation, there have been opinions citing this wounding moment as an opportunity for India to urgently concentrate on bolstering the fundamentals of its economy and becoming a future tiger. Online and elsewhere, there has been much spin on understanding this door-slam as an opening for a golden future of Indians, by Indians, for Indians, in India. What a fantasy.

India is in a South Asian neighbourhood where the youth are roiling. Doom and devastation in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and most recently in Nepal – all long-on-the-boil tinderboxes that exploded to cause regime change – are telling signs of populations in distress.

In these countries, change was mostly led by the youth. In many of them, the youth and people slightly older than them gave their political systems time and faith to make some constructive changes in the structures of their economy and polity. They were looking for indications and concrete actions that signalled support for their future growth and prosperity. In all these nations, already marked by high levels of outmigration due to a lack of growth opportunities at home, the malpractices, the disservices, the miscarriages of justice, and the capture of power and resources by all kinds of political and other elite groups, caused the frustrated young and not so young to shout, “We’ve had enough!”

If any country has large sections of its youth aspiring to get out of it, that country is in some serious trouble. The thought itself is tragic. Leaving home is the hardest thing, even for people who may not always be fully in love with it. On the streets of contemporary metropolitan India, it’s not uncommon to see young Nepalis eking out a living as watchmen, security guards, cooks, and house help. As an outsider, I often wonder, who on earth would want to leave a country nestled in the Himalayas? And yet, what despair must drive hundreds upon hundreds of bright, industrious Nepalis to undertake arduous journeys to become cheap labour in countries such as India, and live out in poky homes.

To some degree, India’s size and internal disparateness appear to have forestalled an upsurge of the sort we see in our neighbourhood. For what it’s worth, our federal structure (despite being subject to sustained extreme shocks in the last decade), warts and all, has appeared to (unsteadily) hold our democratic fort. Some states, such as Karnataka, have made controversial but visible gestures (like the free bus ride scheme for women) to signal that the government cares. Yet, we’d be deluded if we think that India’s youth are not on the brink. I haven’t forgotten the youths who breached the Indian parliament on 13 December 2023, who have all but vanished from our timelines. That contravention, prima facie, was a statement of youth angst against prevailing systems.

Of all things, Trump has put pressure on India’s Ministry of Education in a most unexpected fashion. Evidence suggests that Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka have had a middling recent record in primary and higher education. To arrest such a tide, India now has no choice but to invest in its own systems, including education, and pump more resources and intent into the economy, to keep large sections of restive youth at bay. Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock.

(The writer teaches at the School of Film, Media and Creative Arts, R V University, Bengaluru)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.