Prime Minister Modi recently launched the Viksit Bharat @ 2047: Voice of Youth Portal. A part of the mygov portal, the new youth portal invites the youth of Bharat to submit their ideas and suggestions for making Bharat a developed country by 2047. The portal was launched by PM Modi in a virtual workshop attended by the Vice-Chancellors, Heads of Institutes, and faculty members of universities and colleges across Bharat.
PM Modi, in his introductory address, urged the university authorities to run creative campaigns to involve students in nation-building activities and provide them a platform to play a constructive role in the development of Bharat.
The Voice of Youth portal is a unique initiative that enables the youth to contribute concrete ideas for the nation’s development based on different parameters like economic growth, good governance, social progress, environmental sustainability, etc.
PM Modi in his address also emphasized the pivotal role played by the youth in Bharat’s independence movement. He also spoke at length about how the foundation of the country’s premium universities like VishvaBharati, Lucknow, Kashi, Gujarat Vidyapeeth, Nagpur University, etc could be laid due to the idealism and the patriotism of the youth whose sole focus was on Bharat’s social, economic, educational, and intellectual development.
Bharat has undertaken many innovative initiatives under the leadership of PM Modi to engage the youth in various initiatives aimed at the nation’s growth. The “Swachha Bharat” Campaign involved mobilizing youth on a mass scale. Also, campaigns like Digital India have focused on creating a startup ecosystem pioneered by the Bharatiya youth. PM Modi speaks about the power of youth and adds a motivational dimension to most of his speeches. Many of the themes of PM’s address to the nation “Mann ki Baat” have been focused on engaging the youth in fostering social, cultural, and economic development of Bharat.
Bharat’s youth is at a vulnerable crossroads today. As woke leftist influence in Bharatiya universities has been on an alarming rise over the past couple of decades, it’s high time we fight it back by engaging the youth in constructive activities for nation-building. The youth have tremendous energy, creativity, and zeal, and they need an outlet for their endless enthusiasm and “out-of-the- box” thinking. Young people are also naturally rebellious, so they get attracted to causes that give them a chance to exercise that rebellious streak. That’s the major reason why a lot of youth get pulled into the leftist movements that ultimately take them down the road of hating their own country and culture.
That’s because a lot of woke movements are cleverly packaged as movements of social change and idealism couched in an attractive vocabulary of rebellion and that naturally attracts the youth. Students with idealism who want to break the rut and do something different and radical are simply not well-equipped enough to understand the deceit and cunning of the woke lobby. They take these so-called social movements at face value and thus slowly go down the anti-Bharat road.
To change this narrative, the youth needs to be given the message that activities for nation-building and development of Bharat can be as exciting, cool, and rebellious as the anti-national activities sold to them by the woke lobby. We need to package nation-building and development in a way that the youth feels naturally inclined towards contributing to Bharat’s development. Positive and constructive engagement of the youth will slowly reduce the influence of the woke lobby and radical leftists on university campuses. That’s why initiatives like the Voice of Youth Portal are a great beginning, but a lot more ground needs to be covered in this regard.
The universities in Bharat need to take multiple initiatives to engage the youth in various nation-building activities. Encouraging a healthy debating culture on pertinent topics related to Bharat and the world is one way of doing that. Bharatiya universities have always had an excellent debating culture. This needs to be promoted further to make the youth more aware of news and current affairs – the various Bills passed by the Parliament, different initiatives of the government, the latest development in Bharat’s foreign policy, etc.
External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar has taken an excellent initiative in connecting with the youth by delivering leadership lectures at universities across Bharat. More such lectures on the contours of Bharat’s foreign policy should be promoted on university campuses so that students understand the actual dynamics of geopolitics and Bharat’s positioning instead of falling prey to woke propaganda.
The government of Bharat should also be proactive in countering woke lobby propaganda on contentious laws being passed by the Parliament. Take the Citizenship Amendment Law for example. Many young people who participated in the anti-CAA protests were probably genuinely unaware of the actual provisions of the law. Based on vicious leftist propaganda and word-of-mouth distortion, many of them probably believed that CAA was a law to make Bharatiya Muslims leave the country, whereas CAA had nothing to do with Bharatiya Muslims.
But CAA was combined with NRC by the woke lobby to whip up hysteria and generate a narrative amongst the youth that this is an anti-minority law aimed at cracking down on Bharatiya minorities. Had the government countered this propaganda proactively by organizing talks and workshops in universities on a mass scale explaining the real content of CAA, perhaps, things would have been a bit different.
The educational ecosystem especially in the Humanities and Social Sciences departments of Bharatiya universities is dominated by radical leftist ideology. It’s an ecosystem that’s been built and nurtured in decades so it can’t be overthrown in a day. But the government needs to slowly but firmly dismantle this poisonous ecosystem by creating a strong counter-ecosystem of pro-Bharat voices and scholars like Rajiv Malhotra, Vikram Sampath, Anand Ranganathan, Rashmi Samant, etc to engage with the youth of Bharatiya universities and decolonize and dewokeize their minds. Only when the students have ample access to an alternative viewpoint, they will be able to understand the hypocrisy, toxicity, and lack of logic of the woke narrative being fed to them.
The first-time voters are most vulnerable to the current wave of woke propaganda engulfing Bharat. This is a generation that hasn’t seen the excesses of Congress rule and the complete breakdown of national security that took place during the Congress rule including the 26 November 2009 Mumbai terror attacks.
This generation, being fed on toxic woke propaganda that the BJP hates minorities and wants to establish a Hindutva nation doesn’t know anything about the historical trajectory of Bharat or the trajectory of Bharatiya politics post-independence. Therefore, the onus is also on first-time voters to understand that parties like Congress do not stand for the kind of freedom, liberation, and equality that they are fast selling the youth, and therefore they need to be cautious while exercising their franchise.
