Ethnography of Youth Politics

Abstract

This article explores the world of youth politics and elections in a provincial university in India. Drawing on three years of personal experience in student politics during 1994–97 and six months of ethnographic field research conducted among young men in Meerut town, North India, in 2004–06 and 2010, this article describes how educated unemployed young men are responding to recent political and economic changes in an era of liberalisation through political involvement on their university campuses. Youth politics, which is often perceived as mundane and concerned only with everyday student-campus life, is deeply entangled with local, state and even national politics in a complex web of demands, expectations and competition. This article describes the ways youth are recruited into the larger political system, and also the ways in which student politics shapes larger politics and vice versa, and contributes to the emerging literature on the youth in the Global South.