Jobs and Rights in the Minds of Young Voters for India’s Polls

About 130 million young adults between the ages of 18 and 22 will be newly eligible to vote in India’s national election when polls open Friday — more people than the entire population of Mexico.

AFP asked four first-time voters who were too young to vote in the 2019 election about who they will support and the issues that matter to them:

– The student –

Mumbai university student Abhishek Dhotre, 22, said he was unhappy with the “communal discord seen all over India” as a result of the government’s muscular Hindu nationalism.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has brought India’s majority Hindu faith to the forefront of political life.

That left Muslims and other minorities worried about their future in the nominally secular country.

Still, with India’s economy growing at breakneck speed, overtaking former colonial ruler Britain as the world’s fifth largest in 2022, Dhotre wants Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to win again.

“With the flow of development, infrastructure and everything that is going on, I would prefer the current government to stay,” he told AFP.

– The software developer –

20-year-old Thrishalini Dwaraknath epitomizes India’s economic changes – she is about to move from Tamil Nadu to the tech hub of Bengaluru, both in the south, to work as a software developer.

“I am excited to be a part of Indian democracy and to express my opinion for the first time,” she told AFP. “And I’m glad my voice counts.”

She praised Modi’s government for its achievements in office, but said more needed to be done to help millions of unemployed young Indians find work.

India’s annual GDP growth reached 8.4 percent in the December quarter, but the International Labor Organization estimated that 29 percent of the country’s young university graduates were unemployed in 2022.

“Addressing the skills gap between students and the labor market is critical,” said Dwaraknath.

The story continues

– the farmer –

One first-time voter who will definitely not support the BJP is Gurpartap Singh, 22, a wheat farmer from the northern state of Punjab.

Farmers in Punjab have been the backbone of a year-long protest in 2021 against the Modi government’s efforts to bring market reforms to India’s agriculture sector.

The reforms were later abandoned, marking a rare political defeat for the prime minister, but farmers say their demands have yet to be met.

“So many farmers died in protest,” Singh said. “They’re not right.”

Farmers are a significant voting bloc in India — hundreds of millions of people make their living from the land.

“The government that thinks about the farmers, about the youth – that’s the government that should come to power,” Singh said, adding that the BJP failed that test.

– The transgender woman –

India’s 1.4 billion people span a wide range of backgrounds, including a transgender community estimated to be several million strong.

The Hindu faith has many references to a “third gender”, and a 2014 Supreme Court decision said people could be legally recognized as such.

Yet they face entrenched stigma and discrimination, and Salma, a transgender Muslim woman from the Hindu holy city of Varanasi, said she did not expect that to change under another BJP government.

“The whole time this government has been in power, they haven’t done anything good for us,” said Salma, who declined to say who she would vote for.

“We should get equal rights.”

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