YOUTH CIVIL SOCIETY

An influential debate within postcolonial studies and development studies over the past thirty years has concerned the degree to which ordinary citizens in the contemporary global South are able to transcend lines of social difference to form part of “civil society,” where this term is understood, as in Hegel's writings, as a zone of rational discussion and action manifest in formal, civic organizations. A common line of argument is that civil society is thin in many parts of the global South. Bayart (Reference Bayart2009), for example, argues that formal associational life is conspicuous by its absence in most parts of Africa. Politics occurs primarily through predatory patron-client networks based upon kinship and ethnicity. In this account, exemplified for example in the recent political history of Sudan, Bayart sees the satisfaction of immediate and personal interest as the guiding principle of politics rather than any adherence to liberal democratic notions of impartiality and abstract citizenship. He cites as inspiration a political cartoon in Cameroon showing a tethered goat munching grass and the caption “I graze therefore I am.” Bayart's arguments are paralleled elsewhere (see Pratten Reference Pratten2006). Mamdani, for example, argues that the ubiquity of patron-client relations in Africa is an outcome of the manner in which colonial powers there deliberately worked through the social categories of tribe and ethnic identity, thereby preventing the development of “multi-cellular” (non-particularistic) group life (Reference Mamdani1996).

Somewhat similar claims have been made for contemporary India. Kaviraj (Reference Kaviraj and Manor1991) maintains that the British strategy of divide and rule strengthened the social institution of caste. The postcolonial state developed in the absence of a strong civil society because people lacked a feeling of broader (national or cross-caste) collective togetherness. Chatterjee (Reference Chatterjee2004) likewise argues that “civil society,” in its Hegelian sense of formal associations rooted in impartial notions of solidarity, is the preserve of an upper-middle-class elite in India. The majority occupies instead a zone of “political society” in which they use caste, religious, or other sectarian identities as a means to bid for resources from the state. Political society in Chatterjee's terms, like the politics Bayart describes, is founded on relationships of clientelism, and it tends to be a zone in which ordinary people adopt paralegal, violent tactics. “Political society will bring into the hallways and corridors of power some of the squalor, ugliness and violence of popular life” (ibid.: 202). Similar arguments have been made about Latin America (e.g., De Vries Reference De Vries2002; Fox Reference Fox2007).

Other scholars have argued that Bayart, Mamdani, Chatterjee, and Kaviraj have underplayed the civic understanding and action found within ordinary society in Africa, South Asia, and other parts of the global South. For example, Corbridge et al. (Reference Corbridge, Williams, Srivastava and Véron2005) show how the poor in north India have sometimes been able to connect with lower levels of the state to channel resources to their own households and communities. Likewise, Baviskar and Sundar (Reference Baviskar and Sundar2008) claim that much of the political activity of the poor in India is not aggressively clientelistic but instead is organized around questions of civic and legal rights. Some commentators stress the coexistence of multiple registers of politics such that Western liberal notions of “rights” intersect with, or exist alongside, violent forms of predatory clientelism (e.g., Pratten Reference Pratten2006), and this is a particularly strong theme in recent literature on “popular democracy” (Gellner Reference Gellner2007) and “insurgent citizenship” (Holston Reference Holston2008). Chatterjee (Reference Chatterjee2004) himself has noted that ideas of universal citizenship can appear within “political society” and that, at particular moments, subalterns forge links with upper middle classes such that a broad-based civil society flickers into life.

In contrast, Bayart is enduringly pessimistic regarding the hold that patron-client relations have over politics in Africa. The preface to a new, 2009 edition of his book argues that the spread of notions of democracy has done little to erode self-interested clientelism. The language of “democracy,” he argues, is simply “a form of pidgin language that various native princes use in their communication with Western sovereigns and financiers” (p. xiv). As a counterpoint to Bayart's work—and developing a minor theme in Chatterjee's writing—we argue that young people in Bemni are using ideas of democracy and citizenship to develop an alternative vision of how “politics” might be imagined.

The category of “youth” offers a revealing lens through which to consider civil society. Young people are disproportionately affected by capitalist globalization; they face multiple obstacles to finding secure salaried employment and are over-represented within low-paying sectors of the informal economy (Chant and Jones Reference Chant and Jones2005; Jeffrey Reference Jeffrey2012). Compounding these problems is a revolution of rising aspirations associated with urbanization, increased education, and exposure to images of Western consumerism (e.g., Orock Reference Orock2013). These issues are pressing in both the global North and global South, and shifts in the nature of society and the economy make it difficult to maintain crude distinctions between North and South. But it remains the case that, in the main, young people's access to state resources is more dependent in the South than in the North on their money, muscle power, and social networking skills. Further, gendered and patriarchal norms are often stronger in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, and the importance of arranged marriage “markets” in many parts of the South places additional burdens on youth (e.g., Cole and Durham Reference Cole and Durham2006; Durham Reference Durham, Cole and Durham2008).

A prominent argument, developed for example in the 2011 World Bank Development Report, is that marginalized youth in the global South, where they engage with politics, participate predominantly in violent and illegal forms of politicking (Bayart Reference Bayart2009; World Bank 2011; see also Cincotta, Engelman, and Anastasion Reference Cincotta, Engelman and Anastasion2003). Bayart (Reference Bayart2009: 238) sees underemployed young people as deepening and naturalizing logics of predatory clientelism in urban Africa. Within India, several scholars have pointed to the involvement of subordinated youth in violent politics. For instance, this is a central theme of Hansen's (Reference Hansen1996) work on youth and religious communal riots in early 1990s Mumbai. Such negative evaluations of young people's political activity articulate with, and sometimes rest upon, much older notions of youth as a period of “trouble.” During the nineteenth century in the West, commentators identified youth as a time of instability and semi-dependence, what Hall (Reference Hall1904) later termed a period of “storm and stress” (see Kett Reference Kett1971). Keniston elaborates on this idea, referring to post-adolescents—people in the late teens and twenties—as a “protest-prone” population afflicted by feelings of disconnection from wider society (Reference Keniston1971). Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1984) and Marx and Engels (Reference Marx and Engels1978) argue that marginalized youth are disengaged from politics altogether or engaged only in highly idiosyncratic, ineffective forms of politicking; either way, they are poor candidates for grassroots civil society.

But from another perspective we might imagine youth as well positioned to promote constructive political change within Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Mannheim (Reference Mannheim, Altbach and Laufer1972 [1936]) argues that, within any region, generations experience the same conditions at the same times during their lives and thus come to constitute social units. In particular moments this generation “in itself” can become a generation “for itself,” and Mannheim places particular emphasis on the potential transformative power of a youth generation. Johnson-Hanks (Reference Johnson-Hanks2002) develops this idea conceptually when writing of the importance of “vital conjunctures.” This term refers to extended durations in people's lives—anywhere from a few months to a few years—when structures bear down especially hard but new opportunities for productive change also appear. Johnson-Hanks points to the value of linking these moments to people's biographies; it is often after a birth, death, marriage, or adolescence that moments of change occur, or in the context of social changes such as unemployment, migration, or leaving school. Since in many places around the world these key life changes are often concentrated in the period between people's mid-teens and late twenties, vital conjunctures may be especially likely among youth.

Recent events put empirical flesh on the conceptual bones provided by Mannheim and Johnson-Hanks. Since 2010, people between sixteen and thirty have been at the forefront of political upheavals across the globe. In December 2010, a young man's suicide in Tunisia triggered agitations that brought down the country's president, and large-scale protests erupted shortly afterward across North Africa and the Middle East (see Bayat Reference Bayat2013a; Biekart and Fowler Reference Biekart and Fowler2013). This youth protest has continued in some regions, for example in Senegal, where urban youth played a decisive role in the 2012 elections (Fredericks Reference Fredericks2014), and across the Mediterranean region (Castañeda Reference Castañeda2012). Youth have been key participants in anti-Putin protests in Russia, in school and university demonstrations in South America, anti-corruption agitation in India, and the Occupy movement (e.g., Manilov Reference Manilov2013). People in their late teens and twenties are not always primarily responsible for these movements, but they are prominent within them, reflecting the scale of the pressures they are under and, perhaps, their greater familiarity with electronic communications. While it is important to recognize that these various movements are complex and contradictory in their political effects, we can say that many participants opposed entrenched power and mobilize in a manner that does not take party politics and local patronage networks as the primary point of reference (Glasius and Pleyers Reference Glasius and Pleyers2013; Razsa and Kurnik Reference Razsa and Kurnik2012; cf. Ismail Reference Ismail2013).

Underlying large youth movements, and interacting with them in many ways, is an array of small-scale youth mobilizations and everyday politicking. But a paucity of empirical material on quotidian forms of youth activism stymies efforts to assess the nature of youth civil society or identify the specific conditions under which young people are able to move beyond self-interested patronage politics. Asef Bayat's (Reference Bayat2013b) work on non-movement-based politics in North Africa tries to address this problem, and provides a detailed picture of aspects of everyday activism there. There is also a voluminous literature on cultural politics that examines how young people's everyday activities and cultural styles serve “political” ends (e.g., Diouf Reference Diouf1996; Newell, Reference Newell2012; and within India, Lukose Reference Lukose2009). But Bayat concentrates primarily on visible, urban action aimed at protest and, with the exception of Fredericks’ (Reference Fredericks2014) work in Senegal and a handful of other studies (e.g., Diouf Reference Diouf1996), the literature on cultural politics does not link stylistic performances to wider questions about young people's relationship to “the state” in its different incarnations. Nor does it often highlight issues of social reproduction such as access to education, healthcare, and development goods, or what is sometimes termed “household politics,” for example intergenerational relations in the home. Contemporary, everyday youth mobilization outside of institutions and its connections to wider processes of social and political change are poorly understood.

There are nevertheless some studies of contemporary everyday youth politics, and these suggest that such politics takes one of two forms. A first is “organized youth politics”—youth political activity that occurs within NGOs, associations, clubs, vigilante groups, gangs, factions, parties, or some other named grouping, but is distinct from formal politics since it does not coalesce into formal movements or political parties (e.g., Snellinger Reference Snellinger2005). A second, less-documented type consists of more individualized activism that takes place outside formal movements and named organizations (such as NGOs). This often occurs within fields of competition for education, jobs, health care, and development resources, but also includes, for example, youth negotiating with members of their household in pursuit of specific social goals. Such individualized youth politics is sometimes narrowly self-interested and operates according to logics of patronage (e.g., Jones Reference Jones2010; Martin Reference Martin2013).

Yet emerging studies of youth politics outside of formal movements and organizational settings also point to the roles young people play in various forms of non-clientelistic social work (Juris and Pleyers Reference Juris and Pleyers2009; Daly Reference Daly2010; Krishna Reference Krishna2012). A notable example is Anirudh Krishna's (Reference Krishna2012) account of local politics in western India. Building on survey and interview research in villages in Gujarat and Rajasthan, Krishna identifies the rise of a set of self-styled, youthful “new politicians” who spend much of their day doing everyday political work: lobbying government bureaucrats, motivating younger youth, and taking part in a wide variety of other forms of negotiation within households and in local offices. The new politicians contest established caste hierarchies and redistribute resources from corrupt middle-level bureaucrats to the rural poor, while also stressing their distance from mainstream political parties. Daly (Reference Daly2010) makes similar points in writing about young women activists involved in quotidian politics in contemporary Egypt, who reject the development philosophies promulgated by local NGOs but nevertheless take part in everyday forms of citizenship that challenge gender- and class-based inequalities.

Despite the challenges of comparing dynamics in the global North with those in the global South, Jenny Pearce's work in northern England also highlights aspects of everyday constructive youth politics (2013). She argues that in poor areas of de-industrialized Britain youth are developing what she terms “non-dominating forms of power,” which build “capabilities to act with others in cooperative ways” (ibid.: 652). That this local-level form of empowerment remains mostly detached, both from visible forms of urban activism and party politics, strengthens community activists in the sense that it allows them more autonomy. But this separation also prevents them from expanding and institutionalizing their mobilization.

Read together, the writings of Krishna, Daly, and Pearce point to the existence at the local level, in parts of the world, of diverse youth-led political practices outside the spheres of party political competition and named organizations, which are difficult to understand with only the language of predatory clientelism. We will chart here a similar form of “civic” action among youth in Bemni, but more than other scholars we identify among these youth a preoccupation with emphasizing the generative nature of their political activities. Young people stressed to us that their politics was not concerned primarily with competing over resources, but rather with creating resources, understood to include not just assets, money, and jobs, but also ideas and networks—“capabilities” in Sen's (Reference Sen1999) and Pearce's (Reference Pearce2013) terms.

Anthony Giddens (Reference Giddens1994) also used the term “generative politics,” which he conceptualized as efforts on the part of ordinary people to develop relationships of trust with those in political authority. But Giddens imagined generative politics as a type of general capacity, and he tended to ignore the wider political economic context in which generative politics occur. By contrast, we view the development of ideas of generative politics, and young people's efforts to put such a politics into practice, as a specific response to the political, social, and economic situation in Uttarakhand and the particularities of the social position of youth, for example their education and inability to obtain secure salaried work. Generative politics, as we describe it here, is not a layer of politics that others have missed, but a contingent product of the way young people are inserted into the wider political economy.

Henri Lefebvre's (Reference Lefebvre2008) conceptual writing on the everyday and radical politics is useful in theorizing the contingent nature of the politics we describe. Lefebvre argued that the experience of daily hardship is often crucial in precipitating creative politics. He suggested that in specific “moments”—and he wrote, for example, of love or war as such contexts—a sense of hardship may crystallize and people can come to critique aspects of their everyday life. At the same time, Lefebvre was interested in continuity and the unremitting effects of power. He argued that creative moments of political expression always bear traces of dominant power and eventually devolve back into the ground or humus of everyday life. The everyday—like the vital conjuncture in Johnson-Hanks’ work—becomes a site of tension between creative efforts at personal or social change on the part of the marginalized and the logic of dominant forces (see Goonewardena Reference Goonewardena, Goonewardena, Kipfer, Milgram and Schmid2008). Youth mobilization at the quotidian level is often organized around the unequal contest over resources within patron-client systems, as Chatterjee and Bayart argued, but the hardships and contradictions of everyday life may produce moments of change (Lefebvre Reference Lefebvre2008) or critical durations (Johnson-Hanks Reference Johnson-Hanks2002), in which somewhat novel practices come to life.

BEMNI, UTTARAKHAND

We test and develop this argument with reference to the practices of young people in contemporary north India, building on research that we conducted in the village of Bemni in a remote part of the Uttarakhandi Himalayas. Uttarakhand was established as a separate state in 2000, carved out of the former Uttar Pradesh. It contained about ten million people in 2011. The state is notorious for its poverty, and economic reforms introduced in India since the mid-1980s served on the whole to widen the gap between Uttarakhand and more prosperous states. Uttar Pradesh's Gross Domestic Product grew by only 1.3 percent during the 1990s, less than a third of the national average during that period. Uttarakhand's record in the 2000s was better, but its per capita income was still only slightly above 50 percent of the all-India figure in 2012. The development situation is correspondingly depressing. While educational and other social opportunities are slowly opening up to women and poorer classes, Uttarakhand ranks low in the table of Indian states in poverty rate, female mortality at birth, and electrification of villages.

Poor governance exacerbates problems of economic growth and human development. The Uttarakhand auditor general's reports tell of the institutionalized nature of fraud, nepotism, false accounting, the taking of kickbacks, and bribery among politicians and government officials, all elements of the entrenched nature of a predatory patronage democracy (Comptroller Auditor General 2012). The intended beneficiaries of major development projects rarely get the benefits to which they are entitled. A case in point is the central government employment program—the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). Only about a quarter of the work days that were supposed to be generated through this scheme have actually been instituted in the state. Law and order issues compound the problem of corruption: local government councils are often ineffective as instruments of complaint; the judicial system is inefficient and mired in backlogs and personal favoritism; the police force is notoriously venal and violent; and large numbers of the state's Legislative Assembly members have criminal cases pending against them.

Since the 1970s, a number of popular environmental and social protests in Uttarakhand have targeted the political establishment, especially cronyism and corruption within the State of Uttar Pradesh. Forests cover 63 percent of Uttarakhand (Office of the Registrar General 2001). Under the British colonial regime, forests were largely appropriated by the state (Rangan Reference Rangan2001), a trend that was continued by successive postcolonial state regimes alongside increased commercial logging in the region. In the early 1970s, popular anger at the degradation of the forests and associated problems of flooding and village-level water shortages boiled over, culminating in formation of the “Chipko movement” aimed at protecting the environment. This movement involved a wide variety of civil actors, including rural women, students, and low-caste groups, in disparate agitations seeking to improve rural people's access to forest resources (see ibid.). A later movement for a separate state of Uttarakhand was bound up with not only concerns over state and corporate appropriation of local natural resources but also anxieties in Uttarakhand over access to salaried work in the context of new caste-based reservations in the state (Mawdsley Reference Mawdsley1997).

Of the 10 million people living in Uttarakhand, over two-thirds are upper caste (Brahmins and Kshatriyas, also called “General Castes” [GCs]), with 17 percent Scheduled Caste (SC) in 2011 (Office of the Registrar General 2011). In 1993, the Uttar Pradesh Government acceded to demands by the Indian central government that 27 percent of government posts throughout the state should be reserved for so-called Other Backward Classes: castes “above” the SCs in the caste hierarchy but identified by the state as socially and economically backward. The numerically dominant GCs in Uttarakhand vehemently opposed this measure, pointing out that Other Backward Classes comprised only 2.5 percent of the population of the hill region of Uttar Pradesh and that many upper castes are impoverished. The reservations issue became a rallying point for the successful movement for a separate state of Uttarakhand.

There is close overlap between people's caste status and their access to land, social contacts, and salaried work in Uttarakhand (see Dyson Reference Dyson2006). But higher castes are frequently only marginally better off than SCs in Uttarakhand, and until recently economic disparities within the GCs were also not especially marked. Although caste discrimination continues to occur (Jayal Reference Jayal2001), class and caste inequalities and discrimination are not as prevalent as in neighboring Uttar Pradesh. Research on popular environmental movements in the region and NGO activity suggests that geographical identity—the sense of being part of “the hills” (pahari) as opposed to living “down below” (neeche)—is a powerful bond that in certain instances trumps class-based tensions and caste conflicts (Mawdsley Reference Mawdsley1997; Klenk Reference Klenk2010).

Strong gender norms are characteristic of rural Uttarakhand such that women are not expected to do paid work outside the household or permitted to do so except in a narrow range of occupations such as teaching and work in government nurseries (Moller Reference Moller, Jeffery and Lerche2003; Klenk Reference Klenk2010). Women's development indictors are below those of men, and everyday sexism is a prominent feature of village life. New NGOs are addressing gender issues and scholars are beginning to show how, at the everyday level, rural women in Uttarakhand find ways to challenge or transform relationships of gender dominance (Klenk Reference Klenk2010). But women, especially young women, remain subordinated in local and regional gender hierarchies.

The village of Bemni is located in a relatively remote part of Uttarakhand bordering Tibet, at an altitude of about 2500 meters. It is in Chamoli, a district that is overwhelmingly rural and agricultural: 90 percent of people there lived in rural areas in 2011, according to the national census (Office of the Registrar General 2011). People typically practice a form of agro-pastoralism; they cultivate crops for subsistence, mainly wheat, millet, and barley, and manage large areas of the surrounding forest for pastoral use.

In March 2012, 1055 people lived in Bemni, of which 66 percent were GCs and 34 percent SCs. It looked physically very different in 2012 than it had in 2003, when Dyson carried out research on children's everyday work and identities (see Dyson Reference Dyson2014). Roughly a fifth (14 percent) of households had built two-storied houses between 2003 and 2012, and 10 percent had constructed latrines. The government greatly increased its development assistance to rural areas of Uttarakhand from 2003 through 2012. The introduction of MGNREGA in 2005 resulted in a threefold increase in the money arriving annually via the head of the village council, and this substantially enhanced the council's capacity to provide work to local people and construct village facilities such as irrigation channels, paths, and recreational sites. The government's increased assistance also took the form of stand-alone projects: ninth and tenth classes were added to the local secondary school in 2005; a telecommunications tower was constructed in the village in 2009; electricity arrived there in 2010; and a dirt road connecting the village to the local town became usable in 2012.

Between 2003 and 2012, Bemni was absorbed into wider circuits of knowledge and information: 52 percent of households had at least one cell phone in 2012, compared to less than 1 percent in 2003. Schooling levels rose sharply over the 1990s and 2000s. For example, 86.5 percent of Bemni's men and 75 percent of its women ages sixteen to twenty-five had at least an eighth class pass in 2012, compared to 58 percent of men and 5 percent of women ages thirty-six to forty-five. This occurred even while girls’ and SCs’ education continued to lag behind that of boys and GCs.

The area being farmed in and around Bemni shrunk by nearly a quarter in the nine years between 2003 and 2012, partly because of sales to the government for the road and other projects, and partly due to a general disillusionment with farming. Villagers reported that extreme weather events had repeatedly destroyed their crops in recent years and the prices paid for produce in town had been low. Young people, in particular, had little appetite for agriculture and children were less involved in agricultural tasks than in 2003. The livestock population had also dwindled with this general retreat from farming. At the same time, road and building construction had taken a heavy toll on the surrounding jungle, a problem the village council head exacerbated when he ignored his mandate to manage the forest and instead took bribes from people seeking timber.

Between March and June of 2012 we carried out four months of research in Bemni, examining the economic, social, and political practices of marginalized youth, especially those who were educated but unemployed, or “underemployed” in the sense of being confined to work that did not match their educational qualifications and ambitions. Jeffrey carried out follow-up research in November 2012, as did Dyson in April/May and October/November 2013. We completed a socio-economic survey of the village that was a repeat of one Dyson did in 2003, and conducted semi-structured interviews about young people's educational and employment experiences, marriages, views on the state and politics, and political activity. We interviewed thirty-five of the forty young people (ages sixteen to thirty) who had earned at least a tenth class pass and defined themselves as unemployed or underemployed—five SC men, five SC women, seventeen GC men, and eight GC women. The set of youths that we studied through participant observation around the village was more diverse.

In Bemni, the period of “youth” (jawaani) is commonly imagined as lasting from puberty until marriage. Until the 1980s, people married in their early to mid-teens, moving directly from “childhood” (bachpan) to “adulthood” (bare). But increasing education among men and then women led to delays in marriage, and by 2012 the average marriage age was about twenty for women, and twenty-five for men. This shift extended the period of “youth.” Many men and some women pursued further education into their late twenties and even thirties, and after getting married, and this distanced “youth” from its former association with a premarital period.

In what follows we use accounts of three young people as starting points for discussing the nature of youth politics in Bemni. Our research concentrated on educated, unemployed youth, defined as those eighteen to thirty with at least a tenth class pass. We exclude here those who migrated successfully to urban areas or had no secondary school qualification. We look exclusively at GCs, who tend to be more active in youth politics than SCs are.

SOCIAL MEN

Rajesh Singh, a Rajput (GC), was thirty in 2012 and lived permanently in Bemni. He was educated in Bemni primary school and then at a government secondary school in a nearby village. In the late 1990s, Rajesh received a BA (Arts) from Gopeshwar College, the government degree college in the district town 30 miles away. He earned the degree on a “private” (correspondence) basis since his parents lacked funds for him to study as a regular student. At about age twenty, and at the suggestion of friends, he went to Mumbai where he got a job for six months in a hotel. He then worked in a shopping mall and computer assembly plant in Delhi. In 2003, his father fell ill and Rajesh had to abandon his work in Delhi to meet obligations at home. He managed the process of obtaining treatment for his dying father in Bemni and oversaw the construction of a new family home there. After his father's death in 2005, Rajesh married and then helped to secure a marriage for his sister. He still regarded himself as a “youth” (jawaan), but he also spoke a great deal about his “responsibilities” (zimmedaari).

In 2010, Rajesh went back to college as a private student, and in 2012 he was pursuing an MA in History from Garhwal University in Srinagar. He had only a weak grasp of English, the language of instruction. He could not obtain the original texts that form the backbone of the degree. “The books are only available in Srinagar and I am never there,” he said. Instead, he purchased six “cheat books,” which he used to study for possible exam questions.

Rajesh had a keen sense of being “educated unemployed” and of the difficulty of this predicament. He spoke incessantly of struggle, hardship, and toil (mehnat) and of being in a precarious position as someone very well qualified but without regular work. He managed to make ends meet as a temporary teacher and by giving private tutorials for many local young people. Rajesh also cultivated the family's small farm and spent about forty days a year working on government projects in the village through MGNREGA. He occasionally collected forest products from the jungles and meadows above Bemni to sell to local traders. While Rajesh desperately hoped to get a permanent, full-time government job in the near future, his chances seem remote. He was among eighty-six thousand applicants for seventy-nine low-ranking bureaucratic jobs advertised in March 2012, and he said that bribery and personal favoritism characterize the recruitment process.

Rajesh spent much time pursuing social and political activities. India's school textbooks are filled with references to the importance of serving the nation. For example, a common exercise in Hindi and English primers is to write letters to government officials complaining about aspects of local governance. Rajesh showed us a letter he had written as a schoolboy to a fictional district magistrate complaining about the poor state of the drains in his imaginary city neighborhood. These textbooks also sometimes recall examples of successful civic action in Uttarakhand such as the Chipko movement and the agitation for the creation of a separate state. Rajesh seemed to have absorbed the ideas of citizenship that underpin such exercises and examples. Influenced by textbook accounts of Uttarakhandi activists, he argued that his energies should be directed toward improving Bemni and the Nandakini Valley.

Like many of the young people involved in generative politics in Bemni, and youth around the world who feel detached from political establishments, Rajesh was largely unconcerned about activities of the Uttarakhand Government, party politics, or practices of politicians in nearby towns. Nor was he interested in local and district politics. He expressed indifference toward village council elections, saying, “It makes my head ache.” Instead, Rajesh expressed his dual sense of national citizenship and loyalty to the village by becoming a “social man”(samajik admi) and doing what he described as “politics” (rajniti) in Bemni and the surrounding Nandakini Valley. He repeatedly emphasized how this politics differed from the practices of state and district-level politicians—his was directed toward protecting and creating social goods rather than competing for a share of resources. Rajesh assisted local people during medical emergencies, often by negotiating with government doctors in the village and local towns. He helped to coordinate responses to specific problems in the village, for example in obtaining water or electricity. He also berated the government doctor when he did not come to treat sick villagers, and campaigned for improvements to the local school in which he taught. Rajesh specialized in petitioning government officials by phone or face-to-face in trips to town, and mobilized other youth and villagers around issues of concern.

Rajesh also intervened in interpersonal disputes. For example, in June 2012 a conflict erupted in one of Bemni's households because a young man named Mehendre Singh was discovered to have been having an affair with a young woman named Meena who lived near Delhi. Mehendre had told Meena that they would get married, concealing that he already had a wife and three children in Bemni, and one day Meena made the two-day journey from Delhi for a surprise visit. When she stumbled upon Mehendre and his wife in their Bemni home, he quickly called upon Rajesh and three other friends from the village to help minimize the scandal. Rajesh helped to calm down Mehendre's elderly parents and prevent the police from interfering in the dispute, which cost him two days of missed work and one sleepless night. He also ensured that Meena left the village, telling her, “Do not disturb the village again—Mehendre will either marry you or you must accept that it is over.” Rajesh said afterward, “I have no space left in my heart for Mehendre.” But he was equally adamant that it was his “duty” (farz) to protect the reputation of the village and ensure that the police, who might otherwise have used the incident to extract bribes, were kept out of the hullabaloo. Rajesh emphasized his “sacrifice” (tyag).

Rajesh's case displays challenges faced by young people growing up in Bemni and how some of them are responding to the condition of educated underemployment. They imagined “youth” (jawaani) as a period of considerable hardship. Government education is in dire straits; the state has not invested in improving the curricula in most state schools and colleges, and corruption within the process of appointments and transfers has resulted in teacher/student ratios of over 100:1 in many local schools. None of the four government secondary schools that serve the Nandakini Valley's sixteen villages had a science teacher.

Unemployment among educated young people is a pressing problem. There are more Bemni men ages thirty-six to forty-five in government service than ages twenty-six to thirty-five, despite the marked increase in education in the younger cohort. Several young people referred to themselves as “unemployed” (berozgaar). Few conversations we had were more painful than those with young people who responded to our questions by telling us about the jobs they held, and how they were “breaking stones” (patthar thorna)—literally true in some cases but also an expression indicating a life scrabbling for any form of paid work.

Young men commonly undertook agricultural tasks, ran small businesses, traveled to tourist spots for work, and did manual wage labor for the government or private employers. They typically prioritized different forms of work at different times of the year. For example, before the catastrophic floods of June 2013, young men often went to work in the Hindu and Sikh pilgrimage sites of Badrinath, Govind Ghat, and Kedarnath during the May–October tourist season. Even with this array of occupations, they often continued to seek college degrees and apply for government jobs.

The MGNREGA scheme offers underemployed young men and other sections of village society some valuable occasional income; each household is entitled to work for one hundred days each year at a rate of Rs.120 per day (in 2012, Rs.50 was roughly US$1.00). According to our survey, 68 percent of men between eighteen and thirty worked under the scheme in 2011, most for between twenty and thirty-five days. Far fewer young women did so. Also important are new opportunities for young people to collect caterpillar fungus—called locally “kira jali”—that they sell to local traders, who then smuggle it into Nepal, for transport to China, where it is used in Chinese traditional medicine. The thin black fungi are found extending out of mummified caterpillars at 15,000–16,000 feet above sea level, one day's strenuous hike from Bemni. Many young people make good money from the fungi, and a few specialists in the village collect hundreds of them each time they visit the high pastures. Five young men (three SC and two GC) earned more than Rs.50,000 (about US$1,000 in 2012) from kira jali in May and June of 2012. But selling it is illegal, and young collectors often come into conflicts with the police, who in 2010 seized an entire crop of kira jali from twelve young men. People believe that menstruating women should not prepare food alongside others or sleep with other villagers, and this, combined with assumptions about women's lack of strength and resilience, means that few women older than fifteen collect kira jali.

Rajesh's case also illuminates the activities of the roughly ten other men of ages eighteen to thirty who work as “social men” in Bemni, all of whom reside there most of the time. Due partly to the history in this region of young men joining the army, and partly to the rapid increase in the numbers of people attending school, notions of liberal democracy, rights, and “serving the nation” are strongly held among Bemni's youth. Although a substantial proportion of young men migrate out of the village, most for five to ten years during their late teens and twenties, they usually see the village to be the most appropriate setting for their service. Educated, unemployed youth have the time, motivation, and skills (especially literacy) to help local people deal with state officials, particularly with regard to medical emergencies and issues surrounding resources such as water, food, schooling, and healthcare. They often work alone, petitioning officials whom they feel will be sympathetic, and at other times pursuing politics with small groups of friends.

Young people talking to us sometimes referred to their activities as “work” (kaam) or “service” (seva) rather than “politics.” This was partly strategic: “politics” (rajniti or netagiri) carries a somewhat negative connotation in the village and professional politicians have a bad reputation on the whole. But young men also argued that the process of negotiating with state officials to, for example, ensure that teachers show up at the local school or prevent the police from seeking bribes during disputes, was political in that it involved generating consensus and navigating conflict in pursuit of a definite goal, and often with a larger, transformative project in mind. Some said, “It is politics because it requires so many meetings,” and others, “It is about bargaining.” Young men asserted that it was important to promote this alternative vision of politics in a context in which many people had come to understand “politics” as simply “what politicians and bureaucrats do” and therefore as narrow, self-interested, and focused on zero-sum competition over resources. “Politics is not just about getting one's cut but actually producing things,” declared one young man.

Rajesh and other “social men” said that what motivated them to help fellow villagers was their frustration at the aggressively acquisitive natures of local politicians and state officials, and a sense of responsibility due to their belief that no one else would help. Yet their social actions also seemed to be founded on a sense that, if they got the politics right, sympathetic government officials would be there to help, and that however craven and inefficient the state might be, the government had delivered an impressive range of benefits to Bemni in recent years such as the road, communications facilities, and (slightly) improved schooling.

Social men cultivated a sense of what it was to act well in the political sphere by making sure that in their approaches to politics, decision-making, action, and general comportment they did everything that politicians did not do. They tried to be accountable to those they helped, took no money from the people in return for accomplishing tasks, and were careful to act in a polite, non-aggressive, and “civilized” manner. When young men from Bemni petitioned bureaucrats in their offices in town, they did not typically bring with them the “squalor, ugliness and violence of popular life,” to recall Chatterjee's description of political society (2004: 202). They sought instead to present themselves as educated citizens, well versed in the law. This sense of community service was inextricably tied up with young people's sense of self—as one young man put it, “I am nothing but service (main bas sewa hum),” a phrase that can be loosely translated as “I serve therefore I am.”

We must be careful not to idealize social men's generative politics. They made no effort to address the fundamental problems that affect low castes, such as poverty or the lack of access to the ration cards required to obtain subsidized food. Moreover, and notwithstanding the relatively muted character of caste inequalities in Uttarakhand, the actions of young political men actively reproduced wider divisions in the state between the better-connected GCs and the SCs who were isolated from political processes. Their actions also perpetuated gender inequalities, for example by sidelining women, and especially young women, during political negotiations, and they operated according to socially conservative ideas about the appropriate, limited roles and capacities of village women. Several social men were involved in disciplining young women who had had premarital sexual relations, often by banishing them to an urban area well away from Bemni. Social men were very different from the “thugs” described by Ravinder Kaur (Reference Kaur2010), who police marriage practices in the plains of north India and sometimes violently punish couples who marry across caste lines. They were also unlike the aggressively masculinist “fixers” that Jeffrey has described from his ethnographic research in Uttar Pradesh (Reference Jeffrey2009). That said, they often acted conservatively where issues of caste and gender were concerned.

GOOD POLITICIANS

A set of five young men in Bemni were more explicitly and self-consciously “political” than were the “social men.” They sometimes called themselves “good politicians” to distinguish their activities from politicians at the district and state levels. Unlike the “social men,” the good politicians were interested in becoming involved in village or district-level representative politics.

One of these men was Kirpal, a GC man of twenty-eight from a poor household in Bemni. He did his primary education in Bemni and then passed tenth class in the local town. He married at age twenty-one and left to work in Mumbai, where he manned a speak-your-weight machine in a shopping mall. When his first son was born in 2007 he returned to Bemni, and he now has two sons and a daughter.

Kirpal was not a professional politician, and like Rajesh he was not especially interested in long conversations about state-level party politics. He said that he loathed national- and state-level politicians and bureaucrats, who he claimed were only interested in making a fast buck. But Kirpal imagined himself as a type of “good politician” (attchha neta), with a capacity and responsibility to assist, motivate, and mobilize his peers. Like social men, Kirpal explicitly discussed his politics as generative. “Politics is not only about fighting for seats,” he once said while walking through the forest with Jeffrey, “It is also using your energy and negotiations to produce things for your people.”

Kirpal and other self-styled good politicians channeled substantial efforts into circulating critiques of local corruption (brushtechar). Among their most common complaints were that schoolteachers were absent from school and that the government's midday school meal scheme did not function. They also criticized the system through which contracts were awarded to build government facilities, and berated the village council head (pradhan) for reserving plum posts on local construction projects for his relatives. “Rajiv Gandhi once said that of every one hundred rupees that is spent on development only one rupee reaches the poor,” Kirpal said, practicing a line he had used in public meetings, “But the poor would be lucky to even receive that rupee these days.”

Paralleling wider work on youth mobilization in the 2010s, the creative use of technology was a significant aspect of Kirpal's work as an anti-corruption activist. He used his mobile phone to photograph examples of corruption in the village—the badly constructed paths and leaking government buildings—and he also put his mobile on speakerphone when conversing with local officials so that his friends could hear that he was not doing secret deals behind their backs.

There were four educated unemployed men from Bemni between ages eighteen and thirty who had capitalized on their charisma by taking on responsibility for construction projects run as part of MGNREGA. They could usually make an average of Rs.15,000 a month working as contractors, roughly six times the salary of a manual laborer in the village but still only half that of a government schoolteacher. Kirpal was especially, fiercely critical of the contractors and said that the “true path” lay in trying to help the village.

Kirpal also acted as a motivator, persuading villagers to invest in government micro-credit schemes, explaining to them ways of managing the forest in a sustainable manner, and negotiating with officials over issues such as access to water and electricity. He had been notably active in developing a rotating credit association in Bemni that enrolled both GCs and SCs, and had also been involved in an effort to encourage SCs to attend vocational training events the government put on in the district town. Unlike the young female activists in Egypt described by Daly (Reference Daly2010), who worked to distance their actions from those of local NGOs, Bemni's good politicians had no such concerns. Kirpal had twice been involved in camps organized by local environmental NGOs, and he and other good politicians occasionally traveled to the district town to attend training organized by NGOs that were linked historically to the Chipko movement and the struggle for the State of Uttarakhand.

To a greater extent than social men, Kirpal and other good politicians eagerly participated in public meetings of the local village council and parent-teacher meetings at the school. They were keen to raise their voices (awaz uthaana) and frequently took part in protests. Kirpal, for example, was a prominent figure in a village protest over the failure to construct a road promised the village. He and many others borrowed tools from the town, went to a nearby area of jungle, and in eight days hacked out 100 meters of road themselves. The villagers camped in the jungle each night. The political stunt worked; newspapers picked up the story—“villagers build their own road”—and the district administration was embarrassed into action. Kirpal had also protested inadequate access to electricity and poor local schools, and demanded construction of a communications tower. All these demonstrations involved older villagers and SCs, but tended to be led by GC men in their twenties.

What was also striking was Kirpal's sense of himself as part of a generation intent on change (cf. Mannheim Reference Mannheim, Altbach and Laufer1972; Johnson-Hanks Reference Johnson-Hanks2002): “The new generation have new ideas, new projects, and new energy. Between the ages of eighteen and thirty you have the chance to alter what is happening.” Kirpal said that when he is older he will lack the same energy and that youth provides a moment to reflect upon the world. He was particularly aware of the newness of “youth” as a category. He stated that his father's generation lacked the same room to maneuver because they were uneducated, lacked the same level of awareness of politics (associated both with education and the rise of mobile phones), and had moved quickly from childhood into adult responsibilities on their farms. Echoing ideas we heard voiced by many good politicians, Kirpal explained that his experience of finishing school only to find no employment opportunities had partly motivated him to get involved in politics. “It is frustration,” he said, “plus a feeling that we should serve our people.” He was keenly aware of occupying a “vital conjuncture,” in Johnson-Hanks (Reference Johnson-Hanks2002) terms.

As the example of Kirpal suggests, young people were important not only in managing interpersonal conflict and negotiating with officials over resources, as in Rajesh's case, but also in communicating political critiques in the village, participating in local-level representative politics, and conducting motivational work. The five educated, underemployed young men living in Bemni who referred to themselves periodically as “good politicians” all played roles akin to that of Kirpal. Another five young, male, good politicians who originated in Bemni now lived outside the village. Two were studying, one was a teacher, and two were in the army. They returned periodically to help, motivate, and mobilize. One of these out-migrants, Jaipal, had won election to a sub-district council and then to the district council. He was especially important in bringing electricity to the village in 2010 by launching a concerted campaign over several months to persuade district officials, including the district magistrate, to extend the lines to Bemni. He spoke enthusiastically: “I led the electricity officials through the thick jungle, discussing where high tension wires needed to be placed,” and he described burning leeches off officials’ legs and how he later became friends with the bureaucrats, who even came to his wedding. In another major achievement, Jaipal had used his influence among educational officials in a local town to bring improvement in the ratio of teachers to students in the two main secondary schools that cater to young people in the Nandakini Valley, and to get the secondary school closest to Bemni extended from eighth class to tenth class in 2004.

Good politicians identified “youth” as a period of generational possibility (see also Snellinger Reference Snellinger2005). In addition to referring to the period between eighteen and thirty as one of “action,” young people sometimes said that the present generation (pithi) of people in their late teens and twenties are especially able to effect change. They said that today's youth in Bemni are more educated, better informed, and in closer contact with the outside world than older people and that their experience of hardship had primed them to act.

Older generations tolerated the activities of Bemni's “social men” and “good politicians,” but the rise of young men like Kirpal was resented by three prominent contractors in the region and several government bureaucrats, all in their forties or fifties. This was in part a reaction to the threat that politically active young men posed to bigwigs’ capacity to embezzle funds.

The activities of young good politicians not only addressed immediate problems; they also generated ideas and practices that may serve as precedents for later actions. Arjun Appadurai (Reference Appadurai2002) has described systematic processes of “precedent setting” among NGO activists in Mumbai, who closely archived their activity as a basis for making future claims on the state. In Bemni there was no coordinated process of recording political action, but one effect of young men's assertion was to ensure that ideas about citizenship, rights, and entitlement to government assistance circulated with a new intensity in the village. People remembered incidents in which good politicians had achieved something and cherished them as examples of how the state (sarkar) could periodically work in their interest. Good politicians’ actions also left traces on the landscape that may motivate future assertion. For example, young men often stopped us on the walk up to Bemni village to point to remnants of the road that they constructed to shame the state into action.

It is important not to romanticize the work of good politicians, who, like the “social men,” rarely worked with SCs and were reluctant to be drawn into discussions of caste discrimination as an aspect of local hardship. Low castes in Bemni occasionally bemoaned their relative exclusion from politics and said that they lacked a set of good politicians who could represent their somewhat distinctive interests. Politically active young men rarely involved young women in their mobilization, either, and protests were founded in part on a type of masculine camaraderie.

GENDER EXCLUSION

The importance of gender in shaping young people's political work in Bemni can be elucidated through consideration of Lila, who was twenty-eight in 2012 and is one of seven young women born in the village to have acquired a degree. She had earned a BA (Arts) from Gopeshwar by correspondence, and a Bachelors of Education degree from a college in the State of Jammu and Kashmir. Lila's family effectively bought the latter degree. She did not have to study much, and many people describe such degrees as “fake” (naqli). The Uttarakhand Government has recently introduced a new test that people with Bachelors of Education degrees must pass to apply for teaching jobs. This is designed precisely to weed out students like Lila who have purchased degrees from distant colleges.

Lila had found it impossible to obtain a teaching position because of a lack of opportunities. She said that as a woman she could not enter business, and that the only forms of paid employment a woman could do locally—teaching and NGO work—had little scope. In the spring of 2012 Lila was living in Gopeshwar pursuing a MA in Economics from the college there. She was also looking after her two nephews in Gopeshwar. Her brother-in-law had an army position and could afford to send his sons to a private school in the town. Lila did much of the everyday work required to ensure that her nephews obtained good quality tuition in the town, moved up through school classes smoothly, and earned good marks in examinations. This work entailed negotiating with school principals, teachers, and tutors within the crowded market for credentials and educational assistance.

Lila had recently become engaged to a young man with a BA and a small business in a nearby village. Her choice of a marriage partner was highly constrained because young men worried about marrying someone so “old” and with such high-level educational qualifications. One prospective marriage partner complained after meeting her that she was too “tez,” a double-edged word which means both “bright” and “headstrong.” Lila said that she suffers greatly from “tension” (using the English word) due to her unemployment and with respect to her upcoming marriage.

Lila was not especially interested in party politics, but she participated in several village-based rallies on the theme of improving local schools. In addition, her education and the experience of applying for government jobs had given her a sense of being able to cope with social hardships and public life. She repeatedly referred to an instance in which a man was speaking rudely to young women in a local city who had come to take a government employment examination. Lila not only upbraided the man for his offensive assumption that rural young woman would be dull and ignorant, but she also arranged for her female companions to sit together in a particular section of the examination hall where they could concentrate. “I showed him that I was someone who could speak, that I am not afraid of raising my voice.”

This brief portrait of Lila illustrates general patterns. There were some opportunities for young women to obtain paid work in and around Bemni, even in the absence of secure, well-paid government employment. Four of the twelve young women with high school or greater educational qualifications in Bemni worked part-time in local schools or had more permanent jobs in government nurseries. But the vast majority of such young women there and in the surrounding area found it hard to find secure salaried work. Compared to men, there was less pressure on them to get such jobs, but by equal measure it was harder for them to do so because they had to battle both the scarce job market and prevailing gender norms. In addition, the great uncertainty about whether future in-laws would support their search for paid work discouraged educated single women from planning careers.

With the exception of temporary teaching work and involvement in local development projects, for example through MGNREGA, it was hard for young women to find paid work while waiting for a government job to materialize. It is much more difficult for them than for men to spend long periods outside the village, and they were much more involved than were men in unpaid domestic and farm work: daily household chores, looking after livestock, collecting firewood and grass for fodder, and carrying out tasks in the fields (see Dyson Reference Dyson2008; Reference Dyson2010; Reference Dyson2014).

Uncertainties over marriage often exacerbate young women's difficulties. Under the brideprice system prevalent in the Bemni region in the 1970s and 1980s, young women often married within their own village and could break off a relationship if they were unhappy. Under a dowry system that has become more prevalent over the past twenty years, however, young women can no longer negotiate separations and more often marry outside the village, sometimes far away from Bemni. This dowry system adversely affects young people generally, and especially young women, by amplifying their tendency to assess their appearance, education, and employment in narrowly instrumental and even monetized terms. The dowry system encourages young people to directly compare their own positions with those of youth thought to be more successful. It also intensifies intergenerational social conflict, for example over the successes or failures of past social “strategies,” since these become palpable when marriages are negotiated. While Lila was confident that she could successfully face these various challenges and threats, “tension” was nonetheless a recurrent theme in our conversations about marriage. For young women, the creation of a distinct life phase of “youth” does not provide a straightforward space for social and political action and critique so much as it places new pressures on them, and in some respects the late teens and twenties is now seen as a period of declining social agency.

But educated young women might be seen as “proto-political” in that they often spoke of themselves as possessing the qualities one needs when political action is necessary: they were self-reliant, had courage (himmat), could “adjust” (they used the English word) to different situations, and were aware (jagaarook: literally “they had woken up”). Young women also spoke of having friendships within and beyond the village, mainly with other women, which could be a resource for political action. This sense of latent political potential was highly important in itself and generated various forms of politicking within the family and, to a lesser extent, beyond it. Young women helped family members, for example with medical help during emergencies, and more routinely in negotiating with teachers and school principals, as Lila did in Gopeshwar. They also petitioned local government representatives, especially teachers, when they thought they had a right to do so. They acted politically by generating consensus and navigating conflict in pursuit of desired ends, activities that involved compromise, state authority, power, and hierarchy.