By Azera Rahman, IANS,
New Delhi : The tricky numbers game in the July 22 trust vote in parliament which will decide the fate of the Manmohan Singh government may be hogging the media headlines, but most of the country’s youth don’t seem to be bothered about it.
Rohan Medhi, a third-year student in Delhi University, for instance, said he had been religiously following all the political developments in the media – but only initially.
“After sometime I lost interest. Probably it was until the Left pullout that I used to read the newspapers front to back. After that it was back to my usual reading style, first the sports page at the back and then everything else,” Medhi told IANS.
There are just four days left for the do-or-die trust vote in parliament which will decide whether Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government survives. This situation has arisen over the India-US civil nuclear deal which the ruling Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) wants to push through, but which has made the Left withdraw its crucial support to the government.
Even as allegations of horse-trading and underhand deals are being made everyday ahead of the confidence motion July 22, Indian youths in colleges, universities and even those who are working seem not to care.
Tanvi Shekhar, a student of Christ College, Bangalore, said she tries to follow the latest in the Indian political world but often loses interest simply because she doesn’t understand the nitty-gritty of certain events.
“I have read about it, but I am still very unsure as to what the nuclear deal is all about! What are its positive and negative aspects and how am I going to benefit from it? If I don’t understand something, it’s only natural that I lose interest,” Shekhar told IANS over the phone.
For some like Shagufta Rahman, a student of Guwahati University in Assam, it’s not interest in politics that makes her read the newspapers or watch the TV and follow all the latest political developments, but the competitive exams she is going to appear for next year.
“I am not genuinely interested in what is happening on the political front. But I do follow what is happening because I am preparing for competitive exams,” she said.
Of course, there are a few like Shadab Azmi, a student of Jamia Millia Islamia University in the capital who says he follows the news because he is interested, but a large chunk of them don’t seem to care about the political hullabaloo.
“I am just not interested. Not bothered whether this government remains or falls,” was how Eisha John, who has just joined a BPO in Gurgaon on the outskirts of Delhi, put it.
Ravi Verma, a commerce student in Symbiosis college in Pune, similarly said: “I watch TV and am aware of the political twists and turns. But frankly, I am not bothered”.