Justice Markandey Katju-
Markandey Katju is a former Judge, Supreme Court of India, and former Chairman, Press Council of India. The views expressed are his own.
Today, 12th August is International Youth Day, as designated by the United Nations General Assembly.
On this occasion, I want to express my own opinion of Indian youth.
(1) Most of the Indian youth ( even the highly qualified ones ) are highly casteist and communal. The upper castes and OBCs ( other backward castes ) look down on the Scheduled Castes ( SCs or Dalits ) and often commit atrocities on them. For a Dalit boy to fall in love with or marry, a non-dalit girl is often inviting a death sentence.
(2) Almost all our youth are careerists and have no genuine love for India or its people. They want to join the IAS or some other civil service, become an engineer or doctor, professor, corporate officer, or go abroad. They all want comfortable lives. Almost all who are admitted to IITs ( Indian Institute of Technology, the premier engineering colleges in India ) want to go abroad after completing their B.Tech, to do M.Tech in Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, or some other American University, and thereafter get a job in America and settle down there ( and to hell with India ).
It is therefore idle to have much hope from the Indian youth. How can such selfish people serve the country?
Even the apparently ‘revolutionaries’ among them like Kanhaiya Kumar, former President of JNU, showed his true colors by forgetting all about revolution and contesting the Lok Sabha election in 2019 from Beghusarai in Bihar ( where he lost his deposit ). That other ‘revolutionary’ from JNU ( there are a host of Lenins and Mao’s in JNU ), Umar Khalid ( whose arrest and detention I condemn ), compared the slain Kashmiri militant Burhan Wani with Che Guevara, not knowing that it was Che Guevara’s ‘foco’ theory which was responsible for the debacles of revolutionary movements in Latin America.
That ‘La Pasionaria’ of the Indian Revolution, Shehla Rashid, who used to give fiery speeches in JNU, later joined Shah Faesal’s J&K People’s Movement Party, and then resigned from it. One does not hear much of her these days, except that she is involved in a dispute with her father.
(3) The so-called ‘educated’ youth of India are often arrogant, and their heads are crammed with bookish, sterile, knowledge ( which I often call ‘gobar or cow dung ).
They have no humility, and show off their bookish knowledge, like peacocks strutting around with plumes displayed. They usually have no genuine desire to learn, and get upset if someone corrects their errors.
So I disagree with people who say that the youth are the hope of India’s future. Which youth? This casteist, communal, bookish and arrogant rabble and riffraff?
