What ‘snowflake’ Gen Z voters mean for the future of Indian politics

India is barely 600 days away from voting in the 2024 general elections. This is the first time politicians will face a heightened force of a very interesting species: Generation Z or the Zoomers. There is a certain consensus that Gen Z are those born between 1997 and 2010s. There will be potentially 250 million Gen Z voters in 2024, half of them first-time voters.

Beyond the cold numbers, there is another broad, less kind consensus about them. You will frequently hear them described as “snowflake”, “hypersensitive”, “fragile” or “woke”. These are not attributes for the generation growing up in the West, but those in India tend to exhibit the same pattern.

The overarching unifying factors that are making the young across the world behave in a certain way are not difficult to guess. They have been exposed to the internet, smartphones, and social media around the same time. And it is not just restricted to the upper-class, urban youngsters. In India, for instance, even the burgeoning neo middle class and those from low income groups now have access to affordable smartphones. You can see your cabbie to cobbler, maid to pizza counter girl either glued to or sneaking a glimpse at their smartphones. YouTube is the most prolific babysitter, even in modest homes.

This ceaseless stream of images and videos has cut the young minds off the physical world around them. Reality is either ‘sanitised’ in their friends’ picture-perfect galleries and selfies, or it is dehumanised violence in their games and crisply-edited YouTube videos. Gen Z’s world is in binaries of good and bad, exciting and boring, ecstatic or suicidal…as if nothing exists in the universe-sized middle.

You don’t need weapons. Even words they don’t agree with cut through them. It seems like a generation forever anxious about being ‘safe’ in their bubbles, eager to cancel any new thought that challenges their personal and political beliefs, feeling under attack even by day-to-day, useful words.

Jeannie Suk wrote in The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law. Even the word ‘violate’ (as in “that violates the law”), the students said, may cause them distress. The far-Left, which has most gratuitously preyed upon the Zoomers by exploiting their vulnerabilities, has armed them with terms like “microaggressions” and “trigger warning” to keep them fragile and closed.

One of the finest books written on Gen Z is Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.

“A culture that allows the concept of ‘safety’ to creep so far that it equates emotional discomfort with physical danger is a culture that encourages people to systematically protect one another from the very experiences embedded in daily life that they need in order to become strong and healthy,” it says, adding at another point, “If students succeeded in creating bubbles of intellectual ‘safety’ in college, they would set themselves up for even greater anxiety and conflict after graduation, when they will certainly encounter many more people with more extreme views.”

The book argues that there are three central untruths that this generation uses as its premise:

1. Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.

2. Emotional reasoning: Always trust your feelings.

3. Us Vs Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

It leaves them with an advice: “From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either. And when you lose, as you will from time to time, I hope every now and then, your opponent will gloat over your failure. It is a way for you to understand the importance of sportsmanship. I hope you’ll be ignored so you know the importance of listening to others, and I hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion. Whether I wish these things or not, they’re going to happen. And whether you benefit from them or not will depend upon your ability to see the message in your misfortunes.”

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So, how will this coddled and fragile Zoomer mind manifest itself in the future of Indian politics? Who will Gen Z choose?

Who will engage them better?

Will they get beyond recreational outrage and attention-seeking narcissism of social media and get down to understanding, campaigning, or voting at all?

Can they be dismissed solely as flaky and fragile? What are their strengths and how can those qualities enrich Indian polity?

Let’s invert that order and examine the last query first. No, Gen Z can’t be dismissed by broad generalisations. There is plenty going for this emergent generation.

It values information and amasses it with unprecedented hunger and storage capacity. It may be morally over-sensitive and prone to manipulation, but it sees through unreason better than the previous generations.

The Left will ultimately fail in catwalking compassion without the solid ramp of truth and reason underneath. And the Right can’t sell this generation cold reason alone, shorn of all compassion.

Gender issues, environment, diversity, clean politics, infrastructure, innovation, and a cruelty-free life are important to the Zoomers, and even after you take off the emotional hyperbole they tend to wrap their opinions with, these still remain crucial issues of tomorrow. Narendra Modi's initiatives like Swachh Bharat, Digital India and Startup India, or Naveen Patnaik's 10-year support to the national hockey team vibes with them. Indian politicians will have to honestly come up with and execute such reforms.

Politicians can engage them through images over words (memes, videos, reels), reason over rhetoric, a sentimental pitch over the threat of violence.

The places to meet Gen Z remain Youtube and Instagram, and in the absence of TikTok, Snapchat. Mature politicians like Narendra Modi, Amit Shah, Rajnath Singh, and Shashi Tharoor are already on Instagram. Younger leaders like Devendra Fadnavis, Asaduddin Owaisi, Milind Deora, Mimi Chakraborty, and Nusrat Jahan are quite popular as well.

Whether Gen Z will go out and vote in large numbers is a big question, forget campaigning on ground. This is the generation which has stepped out unaccompanied by parents the least. Many of them are shy or even paranoid about the physical world outside, crowds scare or repulse them, especially the urban, affluent ones.

However, this generation is also acutely keen on its identities. Identities often shield them from isolation, loneliness, real or imagined bullying and targeting. It is a new-age tribalism driven by their idea of belonging and justice. Indian polity will be richer if politicians remain positive and persuasive. It can slide into aloofness or anarchy if they are disingenuous and manipulative.

A strong cause, a charismatic leader can bring Gen Z out in the harsh light of the physical world to vote.

However, it is time India introduces online voting with unique IDs. It will ease the crowds at booths, and make it possible for youngsters to cast their votes from their mobiles or laptops.

For many of us, it may seem unpatriotic to not even step out for one day in five years for your country. But who knows if in the future, patriotism will be packed in a few bytes?

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