No point having a girlfriend in Amethi: Rahul Gandhi's youth problem

“There’s no point of having a girlfriend in Amethi. What’s there to do?”

That’s probably something no one has ever told Rahul Gandhi about his constituency of the last ten years.

Standing on a crowded market street in Amethi with his friends, amidst the endless beeps of honking motorbikes, Rakesh Jaiswal spells it out for me.

“There’s nothing for entertainment. There was a movie hall but woh bhi sala bik gaya (it was sold off). Now I think the closest one is in Pratapgarh. There’s no park we can roam in with a girl. There’s a stadium but we cannot get inside. “

His friend Sandeep Soni, a final year M.Com student says they would sometimes go to play kabaddi at Amethi station, one of the Gandhi gifts to the constituency. “It has a small park like thing but they chased us away with sticks because we had no platform tickets.”

“We just walk around, talk on the mobile. Girl goes this way. You pass the other way and you just say hello. If you are lucky a friend might have a room free for one or two hours one day,” says Jaiswal, shaking his head.

They laugh but their frustration is palpable. Much of the woes of Amethi that Narendra Modi talked about were its lack of development and services, its electricity and water problems.

But for the young people in this city, it’s a different kind of frustration. They have education but no jobs and few prospects in Amethi. “We might have to escape to Mumbai where I hear they beat up people from UP and Bihar,” says Pradeep Jaiswal. They have the same aspirations as many of their peers in other Indian cities but no outlets for them. Shallow as it might seem, it actually embarrasses them that they cannot think of an air-conditioned store in Amethi.

Rahul Gandhi doesn’t understand that because noblesse oblige means the Sanjay Gandhi Hospital, the Indira Gandhi School of Nursing, the good works of the Rajiv Gandhi Charitable Trust , not Café Coffee Days and parks with benches.

Amit, a volunteer coordinator with the Aam Aadmi Party says AAP will get at least 70 percent of the votes of Rakesh and his friends. Unlike their parents, they have little nostalgia for the Gandhis and their frustation has not calcified into resignation. He says there are 7.5 lakh such voters, most of them new voters, in Amethi.

In fact when I first meet Rakesh and his friends they are sporting AAP caps. Raghu from MTV Roadies has just led a little AAP march down the streets, strumming guitars and singing Raghupati Raghava Raja Ram. The volunteers have been handing out the caps. But when I take their photograph, they all carefully remove the caps and pose.

“No one has worked as hard as Aam Aadmi Party for Amethi,” says Sandeep. “But Arvind Kejriwal should not have quit in Delhi. Now here his reputation is a little down. If he can’t do two months, can they last five years?”

“If Kumar Vishwas keeps coming back for five years, the way he has done these last three months, he will win the next time unless Rahul really shapes up,” predicts KP Tripathi who is standing next to us openly eavesdropping on the conversation.

Kumar Vishwas has worked hard to get their votes. He’s promised among other things a sports stadium in Amethi. He’s vowed to reopen closed factories, some of them set up during Rajiv Gandhi’s tenure.

Rahul Gandhi says it’s not fair to tag him as a do-nothing MP. Priyanka Gandhi has said her father created infrastructure like BHEL and HAL. Rahul boasts about an IIIT at Teekarmafi, aka the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Information Technology just down the road from Amethi town.

“But all the students are from outside,” says Sandeep. “We are padey-likhey and sit around doing nothing. There’s a gun factory. I don’t think they even have a chaprasi from Amethi. What use is our education?”

“This is shikshit berozgaari (educated unemployment)” says Rakesh. “That really hurts.”

That’s the bit that eludes Rahul Gandhi even if he is being entirely well-intentioned as he unrolls a new raft of measures and adhikaars and guarantees at his rally. Right to a roof over your head. Free operations and medicines. Right to pensions. These young people do not want it as hand-me-downs. They actually have affection for Rahul but they don’t want his charity. They want to feel that their education was worth something.

“I just want jobs,” says Sribham Singh at the Narendra Modi rally in Gauriganj. “I”ve done a BA but there’s no job after you graduate.” “Modi aayenge, job toh milenge (When Modi comes, we will get a job at least),” says his friend Rahul Verma hopefully.

Rahul’s speeches often target the poor, the destitute, the helpless.But these are young people who all feel they are somehow getting left behind. A young Muslim woman in Jayas where Rahul and Priyanka have their flower-strewn roadshow says these days girls want to stand on their own feet. She’s studying for her intermediate but it’s just a degree in name she says. She does not see any prospects of a job. The local college has no teachers. “What will happen to someone like me? I guess I will just get married off,” she says resignedly

In other rallies Narendra Modi had really targeted the aspirations of that 18-24 year old group. Every moment in that age bracket is precious, he likes to say. Even a month wasted then hurts you. Do you really want to risk wasting five years on some hotch-potch government? He would have done better to have spent more time making that pitch at his rally than gossipy score-settling stories about the petty tantrums of the Gandhis.

It is not fair to say that the Gandhis have done absolutely nothing for Amethi. It’s true that they are absentee landlords and their local representatives have been corrupt and inefficient. But they have set up factories and hospitals though Mohammad Ali, another friend of the Sandeep and Rakesh, claims it does not even have dog bite medicines. And as Rahul reminded his rally, the Gandhis have also given Amethi, that little dot on the map without even a decent hotel, seven national highways.

The irony is that for these young voters of Amethi that’s the only Gandhi bequest that’s really of practical use – to get out of town to places that might actually have jobs for them.