Myth of the ‘youth card’

Prior to the May 2013 general elections, many political commentators used to passionately claim that the PTI would lead a ‘tsunami’ across the political landscape of the country via the electoral process.

The supporters of this party would repeat, almost verbatim, the position taken by their party chairman: “People will forget about the 1970 elections in which the PPP swept the elections across West Pakistan.”

There was a lot of frenzy about the ‘youth card’. Khan’s excitement and confidence in the ‘youth’ – the vanguard of the ‘stolen’ Insafian revolution – was unshakeable. It was obvious that in Khan’s mind the youth of the country had ‘decided’ that their loyalties were with the PTI. Khan would often start his sentences in the first person as ‘mere naujawano’ before embarking upon his grand vision for a ‘Naya Pakistan’.

The intellectual basis, or lack thereof, of this grandiose claim lay in the following assumption: The youth of Pakistan is with the PTI and since the youth represents nearly 65 percent of the Pakistani population the PTI would be taking a victory lap on the shoulders of this ‘demographic’ asset in the upcoming elections.

Of course, the theory rested on the assumption that Pakistani voter preferences were indeed split along generational lines. There is no plausible basis to make such an assumption. The innocence latent within the PTI’s self-proclaimed analogy with the 1970’s election seemed to the common observer as missing a very basic fact: the success of Bhutto’s PPP in West Pakistan lay in its ability to garner votes along class lines.

Similarly, Mujib’s Awami League swept the elections in East Pakistan on the basis of a predominantly nationalist political programme. Thus while the PPP’s landslide victory in 1970 was an outcome of its pro-workers and peasants rhetoric the success of the Awami League was rooted in its ability to channel the democratic, nationalistic yearnings of the Bengali masses. In neither case was the political split between the democratic majority and the losing minority on the basis of ‘generational’ lines.

The political ‘analysts’ who were predicting a landslide PTI victory were basing their judgement on a false analytical dichotomy between the ‘youth’ and ‘everyone else’. The PTI ‘youth’, in turn, had assumed that they represent ‘all the youth’ of Pakistan. Of course, these people shared a common birth decade with many other voters.

However, the differences in the economic status and social privileges of these voters far outweighed the superficial correspondence in their ages. They forgot to realise that the ‘youth’ is not a monolithic entity. On the contrary it is divided along class, ethnic, linguistic and nationalist identities that are rooted in history and shape the ideological, cultural and political attitudes and choices of the people in different ways.

The 2013 elections proved how false the ‘generational-voter’ theory really was: Pakistani voters did not vote along generational lines. It was simply not true that ‘the father would vote for a mainstream candidate and the youngsters would vote for the PTI’.

The bankruptcy of the theory can be best gauged from a survey that was conducted by Gallup on the day of the election (May 11). Two important insights can be drawn from the results. First, only about 26 percent of voters between the ages of 18 and 24 voted for the PTI whereas 37 percent of the voters in this age bracket voted for the winning party – the PML-N.

Similarly, the winning party garnered about 30 percent of the voters’ share in the 25-29 years age bracket while the PTI could manage only about 22 percent. On average the PML-N was favoured by about 33.5 percent of the voters below the age of 30 while the PTI was favoured by 24 percent.

Second, while the percentage of voters preferring the PPP and the PML-N is roughly the same across the various age brackets it is also true that the percentage of PTI voters in the 18 to 24 category is twice the percentage of PTI voters in the ‘greater than 50’ age bracket: 26 percent in the former whereas only 13 percent in the latter.

The conclusion is very clear: While ‘youthfulness’ is indeed a defining feature of PTI voters it does not follow that all ‘youthful voters’ prefer the PTI over other parties.

Of course, the results would not be surprising to anyone who had been following the two surveys prior to this one. The first was conducted by the IRI in November 2012 while the second survey was conducted in February 2013 by Gallup.

The IRI survey predicted that about 18 percent of the voters preferred the PTI whereas 32 percent preferred the PML-N. The PPP’s popularity stood at around 14 percent. The Gallup survey, which was conducted three months later, predicted a 41 percent share for the PML-N as opposed to a 17 percent share for the PPP and a 14 percent share for the PTI.

If we take the average of these two surveys one can argue that the surveys had predicted that the PML-N would get, on average, about 37 percent of the votes while the PTI and the PPP would get about 16 percent. Thus, the PML-N’s average score in the two surveys is exactly the same (37 percent) as the age-wise voter-survey results captured by the Gallup survey conducted on the day of the election. The conclusion is very straightforward: Youth voter preferences were, on average, identical to the national average. There were no ‘surprising’ deviations.

Thus, the evidence – the results of three surveys and the election itself – points towards the fact that there is no basis to assume that there is any significant ‘generational’ bias in voting patterns across Pakistan. It follows, that there is no reason to assume that the ‘youth’ of Pakistan stands shoulder to shoulder with any particular political party. On the contrary, it seems that age-wise voter preferences are almost identical to the national average.

There is a very important lesson to be learnt from this about Pakistan’s electoral politics. It is a lesson that every serious political party should learn about voter preferences: It is very charming to call upon the ‘youth’ as an independent political category by invoking rhetorical images of the ‘new conquering the old’. However, this view obscures from the real differences behind people’s political choices by superimposing an apolitical and ahistorical conceptualisation on real politics.

Of course, it is not a coincidence that this ‘declassed’ and ‘denationalised’ political discourse lies firmly within the ideological framework students must reproduce in order to pass the ‘compulsory’ Pakistan Studies course. It follows that most proponents of the ‘youth should unite’ hypothesis personify the state-approved Class 9 textbook.

The real political economy of the country is embedded in the ‘class’ and ‘national’ identities that have been formulated in the course of history. The ‘youth’ is, at present at least, not a significant category in Pakistani politics.

The writer is a PhD candidate at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is also a founding member of the band Laal and its former lead singer and tweets as @ShahramAzhar