India’s Gen Z and the Media

India Today

Arundhati Roy’s article in The Wire, an online political journal, made me think of whether the Indian media failed to give enough coverage to the recent youth movement against the Modi government, led by the sarcastically named Cockroach Janata Party. She accused the mainstream media of “hostility” toward the youth movement.

Did the mainstream media fail to do justice to the youth? I’ll take a brief look at some of our mainstream media.

Outlook thinks that the movement proved that democracy in India is not dead yet. The magazine’s editor Neeraj Thakur wrote: Nothing illustrates that (democracy’s) resilience better than the latest movement led by a motely group of Generation Z. They believed that Indian democracy still possesses the capacity to correct itself after the first flush of arrogance born of an overwhelming electoral majority. Their faith has been rewarded. The resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan is not merely the fall of a minister. It is a reminder that in India, governments may command majorities in Parliament, but they continue to govern only so long as they retain the confidence of the people.

Thakur foreshadowed Arundhati Roy who expressed her elation on the new life that democracy has found in India through the Cockroach Party. “For the first time in years, it feels wonderful to be Indian,” she wrote in The Wire. “Just when hope seemed lost, they came. Young roaches…” came and reclaimed not only our democratic rights, but our dignity, and civic courage in the face of an increasingly authoritarian state and decaying public institutions.

India Today is one of the most opportunistic magazines in India. It can put its feet on two boats and ride smoothly, pulling out one foot at the right time in the right way. However, generally, it plays safe and sticks to the government’s own boat. This time its editor Aroon Purie wrote with his characteristic shrewdness: India’s youth demographic is literally the largest that has ever existed in human history. With declining fertility rates, it will also never be matched. There are 753 million Indians under 30, more than the combined population of the US and EU. Those between 15 and 29 number 371 million. But the paradox of a growing economy is that it creates more aspirations than it can fulfil.

The blame goes to the population, not the government.

He went on to give more stats. 12 million young Indians enter the job market every year. But state-led employment is in retreat. MSMEs are still recovering from a decade of successive shocks. Only 3.73% of India’s work-force has formal vocational training, against 75% in Germany and 96% in South Korea. Only 42% of graduates are deemed employable by the industries that might hire them. Worse than unemployment, this creates a permanent cohort of disenchanted young people who see no future for them.

The Week’s editor Philip Mathew is South’s Aroon Purie: Can we trust our children to the political system? He didn’t go much beyond that question.

The Week

If India’s media didn’t give due justice to the protesting students, America’s Time did. It was an exhilarating spectacle to watch a prime minister elevated to the status of a demigod through the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars of public money spent on ubiquitous advertising campaigns, becoming the butt of a torrent of wickedly humorous, profanity-laced slogans from young men and women in the capital.

Time went on to say that for India’s youth, Modi has become the symbol of the hated system… He is no longer the crusader against a corrupt and sclerotic system but its prime patron. Modi treats the ordinary people like cockroaches. Time also informs us that more than 1,23,000 students committed suicide in India between 2014 and 2024, according to India’s National Crime Records Bureau.

Well, I went through only a handful of publications. Quite many of them did cover the youth agitation pretty well. Probably, most remained cautious. After all, it’s difficult to remain in business in India after questioning Modi beyond permitted limits. I meticulously avoided publications like Open which are Modi’s obsequious acolytes. I’m sure Open’s editor S Prasannarajan confounded his readers with some exotic names like Anton Jager and Milan Kundera.

When the press becomes a shield for the government, it stops being a sword for the people.

It’s not only “the cockroaches” that are fighting in India right now. As Ms Roy writes in her above-mentioned article, the Adivasis in Madhya Pradesh are protesting the Ken-Betwa river-linking project, villagers in Uttarakhand are protesting the mass felling of trees, various people are protesting the environmental desecration of the Greater Nicobar Islands, and Manipur is boiling. Jobs are disappearing. “Prices are soaring. Fury is building. And the BJP-RSS’s God game is getting exposed for what it has always been. A hoax.”