As yet another General Election looms in India complete with polarisation on all sides being the name of the mobilisation game, it’s perhaps apposite to reexamine what age Indians ought to have the right to vote. For the first four decades of Independence, 21 was the age at which voting rights came into play for citizens. Then came Rajiv Gandhi’s unleashing of the nation’s so-called youth potential and the voting age was lowered to 18 via the 61st Constitutional Amendment, 1988, which was passed into law in 1989. It’s been downhill ever since.
As early as in 2018, foreshadowing the march of populist and emotionally charged narratives the world over, psychologist Dr James McCue of the Edith Cowan University in Western Australia pointed out that the idea of adulthood – when it happens and how it is defined – is being challenged. Australia, Japan, and Malaysia are among many countries which have, with varying degrees of success, attempted to lower the voting age in recent years. In the main, the motivation for this move has been to address voter apathy and help young people feel more engaged in politics. But it may also signal that social views regarding the commencement of adulthood have shifted across the board, in effect becoming more dynamic in the definition of adulthood.
McCue’s research iterates that adulthood has traditionally been defined by a combination of age and the achievement of social milestones, and most countries have a legally defined age to determine when a person is considered an adult or has attained majority. In India, this is 21 years of age except in the highly discriminatory minimum age for marriage which is pegged at 18 for females but 21 for males. What is also not recognised enough in these parts is that becoming an adult is a process, with gradual increases in social responsibility, and not an event.
Rapid social changes, the hallmark of a society in transition, have accentuated the already chaotic ecology of contemporary India and have resulted in our expectations of young people and their levels of responsibility getting increasingly diverse. It has been brought out by experts that psychologically, age alone is an unreliable determinant of adulthood, as each individual varies in their rate of biological, cognitive and emotional development.
The recognition of a new life stage – emerging adulthood – has been recommended by developmental psychologists to account for the changes to social milestones that have traditionally represented adulthood. The concept of “emerging adulthood” acknowledges the varied levels of independence exhibited by young people and reflects the process of personal development, writes McCue. So, if a more dynamic definition of adulthood is adopted, at what age is it reasonable to assign social responsibility and by implication voting rights to young people?
In the Indian context, that must be 25 for the Lok Sabha i.e. General Election, 21 for State Assembly polls and 18 for panchayat and urban local bodies.
If, as the psychological evidence suggests, the current approach in law of gradually increasing social responsibility for young people is prudent and accurately reflects the transitional nature of development to adulthood, the above suggestion should surely find takers. Young people in high arousal situations are at risk of making impulsive decisions up until their mid-20s; however, during times of low-emotional arousal, the reasoning abilities of young people are equivalent to adults, research has underlined.
In India, civic engagement and its concomitant notion of nurturing a sense of civic nationalism premised on the idea of a non-supremacist Indic civilizational ethos is vital for citizens to have skin in the nation-building game. The nature of the adulthood of its citizenry, therefore, becomes vital in this endeavour to build a calmer, less frenetic, and more reasoned political discourse.
The modified voting ages suggested here seek primarily to achieve a twin-objective: First, to make responsible citizenship aspirational and privilege it as an attainment not to be exercised lightly but only after mature introspection; secondly, to ensure that the voting system is structured to reflect a progressive increase in both rights and responsibilities. In the process, it may even protect younger co-citizens of the republic who are in the process of ‘finding themselves’ from acting upon the propaganda, rent-seeking, and discourse that comprises the outreach architecture of all political parties including those on the extremes.
The argument is not, it bears underlining, to prevent those in the 18-25 age bracket from believing and/or being receptive to whichever political narrative tickles their fancy but to ensure that a cooling off period, in a sense, is in place before they act on their individual political predilections.
Then there’s the ‘independent economic contribution’ argument which, in the Indian context, where children in the main stay in the parental home far longer than in developed Western democracies and function as autonomous citizens in the economic sphere at a later stage in life (usually only by their mid-20s), cannot be ignored. This holds true both in urban and small-town India across the middle class and lower/emerging middle class, as well as in rural India where those dependent on agriculture tend to split landholdings between siblings to function as independent economic units much later in life than at 18 or even 21.
The palliative to the danger of a disconnect with democracy among young people is the progressive voting-age scale which is being suggested, as opposed to burying one’s head in the sand and pretending that radicalised, lumpen youth are not the bigger danger to Indian democracy.
The age of 18 is old enough for young adults to have a say in local governance; 21 to grapple with issues at the state-level and; 25 to engage with the national and international priorities of our nation-state. After all, if one needs to be 25, as one does, to stand as a candidate for the Lok Sabha election, on a parity of reasoning there is nothing wrong with the electorate also having that as the minimum qualification-age to vote in that poll.
Similarly, 21 years of age, the minimum suggested for being eligible to vote in Assembly elections, is no different from the age requirement that existed for 42 years to be eligible to vote in Lok Sabha and Assembly polls and it cannot be anybody’s argument that the Indian electorate did not use its ballot wisely and well despite much lower levels of education and prosperity. The 18-year-old threshold is apt for local polls to enable a rights-and responsibilities regime to boost robust grassroots democratic traditions and encourage electoral interface by the youth on everyday issues that impact them directly. That is the way to combat the traction generated by emotive disruptions initiated by a self-seeking political class.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that despite castigating its predecessor governments and attempting to rollback many of their policies, there’s not a peep from the current regime on the voting-age issue. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
