It would be nice to rejoice over the election results as a long-overdue, sound beating for the communal and murderous BJP and its multiple manifestations like the Ram Sene . But some observers see a more important message in the results that we may ignore at our peril - the power of youth.
The fact is today’s election results are a wake-up call not just to the political parties in the country, but also those in authority everywhere in our country. All day long, political pundits, media analysts, pollsters and political parties have been asking themselves – how did this happen, how did we get it so wrong?
Perhaps one reason is that this election has been driven by youth in a country where 50% of the people are below the age of 21 and 70% below the age of 35. Interestingly, the Congress victory was driven by a young man of 38, relatively young by Indian standards. The old wo/men in the other parties, in the media and even pollsters scoffed at him and his sister who carefully increased their media profile over the past three weeks (see Outook with Priyanka on the cover).
Modi made fun of her as a "gudiya" (doll) and likened Rahul to ’small fish’ in an aquarium. http://sify.com/news/fullstory.php?id=14860179 He said BJP leaders like him are like ‘ocean fish’ who weather big storms, unlike those ‘floating around in aquariums’.
"We are not small fish floating around in the comfort of aquariums, but we weather huge storms to win," he said in an obvious dig at Rahul Gandhi. "We are not flowers cultivated by gardeners of the rich, we have grown up in the forests on our own," Modi said. Now, it turn out the small fish has swallowed the big one which at the end of the day was trying to figure out how it landed in the belly of the small one. Or, to use Modi's other analogy, the mighty forest oak got felled in the storm while the little flower survived.
But apart from the youthfulness of the emerging India, there is another quiet revolutionary happening. Watch this space...tomorrow!
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