New Kids on the Block

India can feel reassured that there is young talent to replace the failed and faltering leaders

- Harish Khare

FOR now, we find the familiar but old faces preening themselves on the national stage. Narendra Modi, Rajnath Singh, Chandrababu Naidu, Nitish Kumar, Mallikarjun Kharge, Sharad Pawar, Shivraj Singh Chouhan and others still have the potential to muck up our collective lives and constitutional arrangements. Perhaps we need not despair all that much.

Because the good news is that the just-concluded 2024 Lok Sabha elections have produced a new crop of young leaders who have crowbarred their way to national attention; this youngish lot has demonstrated a new energy and a new openness to ideas and a new willingness to recognise and respect the need for change.

Of course, the most outstanding new voice to emerge from the 2024 battle is a de-pappufied Rahul Gandhi. His resurrection from the depths of despair and defeat in 2019 to a more-than-respectable score of 99 Lok Sabha seats for the Congress is a story that needs to be told separately.

No less arresting is the story of the many new kids on the block. And, these kids are going to take over the streets in the next few years. Watch out, at least for these three:

Akhilesh Yadav

By far the most important new kid on the block is Akhilesh Yadav, the Samajwadi Party (SP) leader, whose exertions in Uttar Pradesh have not only denied the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) a Lok Sabha majority, but have also punctured the Hindutva balloon in India’s largest state, the epicentre of the Ayodhya movement.