A politics that looks to the past cannot resonate with youth who look to the future

Opinion A politics that looks to the past cannot resonate with youth who look to the future

When young people reject the established order and hand power to outsiders with no governance experience, the clear message is one of disillusionment and dissonance, not a list of problems and issues awaiting solutions

On September 10, 2001, I dined at a restaurant in the World Trade Centre in New York. The next morning on television, I watched, in horror, a plane flying into that very building. Few events in a lifetime mark a moment of a world before and a world after. September 11, 2001 was one. Those memories still linger and they reoriented the very idea of airports, borders and foreigners in my head.

On September 10, 2026, I was scheduled for a Zoom conversation with 20 graduate students on the topic “youth, protests and their future”. It struck me that the 25th anniversary of 9/11 was upon us, and that the students may like to hear a first-hand account of that day and its subsequent impact on the world. When I offered this as a choice, two-thirds declined saying they would rather hear me talk about the future of the Cockroach Janta Party. I was taken aback.

Few people in India have experienced the significant events of 9/11 closely enough to be able to offer a first-hand account of the day. Yet the students were uninterested. They granted 9/11 its historical significance, but they wanted to discuss the future with their politicians, not the past. That sparked a larger question in my mind. Is this past-versus-future dissonance between an old political class and a young citizenry the fundamental cause of youth disenchantment with politics — the disenchantment that erupts in protests, or in an electoral mandate for a rank outsider like a movie star?

The intent here is not to exaggerate a small anecdote involving 20 students to mean more than it should. Sixty per cent of Indians were unborn or under five when 9/11 happened. For them, it is history, not memory. For us older politicians it may be the landmark event of our lifetime; for a young India burdened with its own anxieties about the future, a discussion of 9/11 is perhaps an “elderly privilege”.

This dissonance between a political class’s penchant for the past and a generation anxious about its future repeats often and was starkly evident even recently: Just as thousands of youth under 30 were protesting in Jantar Mantar, the Modi cabinet with an average age of 65 was amending a 1971 Act to include Vande Mataram. Or when Parliament with an average age of 59 was squabbling over authenticating text from two-thousand-year-old Manusmriti.

Over the past decade, our politics has argued more about India’s freedom movement than about climate change or youth hopelessness. A rough analysis reveals that the share of speeches by Members of Parliament that look backwards ( more than 20 years) has been rising steadily over the past years. Put simply, Parliament is increasingly debating the past while the youth are yearning for their future. This may simply track the rising average age in Parliament, ironically affirming Aristotle’s ancient observation that the old live by memory where the young live by hope.

That people live longer and healthier is a triumph of human progress. But it also means older cohorts hold power and wealth far longer. Understandably, they prefer to discuss the past, which they know more of, than the future. An aging politics is set on preserving the status quo rather than renovating it — in direct conflict with the aspirations of a young society.

This is also the theme of Yale professor Samuel Moyn’s new book, Gerontocracy in America: Gerontocracies let known problems accumulate rather than solve them, because the costs of those problems are borne by the young that will outlive the old, and avoiding the risk of a solution is easier for the old that wield power. There is a fundamental clash of incentives between an aging politics and a young nation. Moyn proposes technocratic solutions such as retirement age and tenure limits for politicians, which are debatable.

Then there is also the malaise of “history intellectualism”, to which even young politicians succumb. Citing dates and anecdotes from century-old events carries a veneer of intellectual superiority in our society. Or quibbling over whether Rabindranath Tagore in 1911 wrote the national anthem as an ode to King George or not. The political class spends an inordinate amount of time dwelling on the past, from the Vedas to Nehru, in a show of competitive intellectualisation of history.

History is not unimportant. Such debates are vital to understanding a nation’s legacy, and lessons to learn from the past. Academics and scholars must pursue them with rigour and intensity. The question is narrower: Do India’s young voters elect politicians to explain how we got here, or to tell us where we are going?

Youth disenchantment with establishment politics is rising and real. It is facile to presume that such disillusionment is tied only to specific issues or problems such as paper leaks or joblessness. When young people in Nepal, Sri Lanka or Tamil Nadu reject the established order and hand power to outsiders with no governance experience, the clear message is one of disillusionment and dissonance, not a list of problems and issues awaiting solutions. A gerontocratic, past-obsessed politics is the disconnect itself — and it erupts into protests and radical ballot choices.

Of course, age is only a reflection of the state of the mind. Plenty of older leaders are innovative and plenty of young politicians are reactionary. The problem is time horizons, not biological age; age is only a proxy. One cohort governs from memory, the other lives in expectation. Our politics needs a temporal realignment with the youth. Politics that is about the future and solutions, not about the past and memories. A politics that assuages the anxieties of protesting youth in Jantar Mantar, not one that litigates legacies or indulge in faux intellectualism.

Chakravarty is a Congress Member of Parliament from Tamil Nadu in the Rajya Sabha