Except it isn’t really overused. The word is everywhere because the concept is. Almost 30 per cent of Indians are under 15; over half are under 25. India’s median age is the lowest among the major liberal democracies and major economies. Our electorate, our workforce, and our consumers are all correspondingly young. The word’s ubiquity notwithstanding, our policy-making has changed only marginally; our political culture — and even our pop culture — has responded to a changing age profile even less.

These elections have driven home exactly how much of a gap this can create between those who make plans and those who they’re planning for. The BJP, for example, is generally believed to have missed a trick when it decided that V.K. Malhotra would have to be its chief ministerial candidate in Delhi. The capital is believed to have seen a big jump in first-time voters, perhaps three million of them. (Of course, there would no doubt have been more if the election commission had not tried airing irritating “youth-friendly” jingles on FM encouraging people to vote.) And, according to a couple of exit polls, they went with the Congress rather than the BJP by a double-digit margin.

Why they did so, however, isn’t quite as simple as quick-and-dirty analysis on live TV would have us believe. The idea that Sheila Dikshit somehow turned into a Youth Icon when nobody was looking was played with briefly and then, thankfully, discarded. Subsequently, people have surmised for us that the half-decade between Malhotra, 76, and Dikshit, 71, was crucial; that young people,“didn’t want to politicise terrorism” (unlike, say, the 40-pluses?); and really pretty much everything except the possibility that the younger generation prefers undyed hair. And of all the wild surmises thrown out, only one really rings true — that the problem was not Malhotra’s age, but the age of the BJP’s ideas. Those were, if you will forgive the half-lisped pun, youthless. The BJP has dominated Delhi for decades; under Malhotra and Madan Lal Khurana, it grew rapidly in the 1980s. It hasn’t, however, updated the way it spoke to Delhi about itself. Delhi’s BJP is still fighting yesterday’s battles in today’s city: allying with the Akalis to remind people about 1984, hoping that Sahib Singh Verma’s son can “deliver” Jats in Outer Delhi. Delhi’s young voters will have looked at a party that still views their city as the Punjabi khatri refugee town it once was rather than the complex, cosmopolitan, metropolis it is becoming, and rejected it.

That’s the crucial difference about younger voters, younger countries: they don’t see why certain disagreements become the focus for political squabbling because of history, rather than for any current reason. Consider the Clinton-Obama battle in the US. Some of the open hostility that Obama’s devoted young worshippers indulged in against the Clintons’ “divisiveness” was because they simply didn’t understand the context: the deeply divided generation that came of age in the 1960s and how the two presidents from that generation — Bush and Clinton — represented two poles of that decade’s vicious campus fights. An electorate that grows younger moves on where the political leadership cannot.

Sometimes, when you want to check a hypothesis like this, it’s best to go to the smallest, least complicated place it’s being tested. Which is, in this case, of course, Mizoram; a state where the new chief minister, Lalthanhawla, explicitly told The Indian Express that the Congress’ defeat of the former insurgents in the Mizo National Front was because of “young people who were born after the peace accord of 1986 and cast their votes for the first time.” Mizoram’s younger voters don’t care which of their fathers fought which in the 1970s. Participants in those fights didn’t get this in time.

India’s going through a demographic transition that is unprecedented. No other country has undergone it when it’s also had universal suffrage. When the US came close — the bulge being the post-WWII “baby boom” — the political effects were striking, from the election of Kennedy onwards. (The photograph of JFK’s inauguration makes the sudden shift explicit: it is a sea of old-fashioned top-hats with Kennedy alone bareheaded. Perhaps Obama will show up at his inauguration without a tie.) It’s particularly noticeable how young India is when one returns from abroad: it was depressing, I remember, to be moving from somewhere where I was below the average height to somewhere where I was above the average age.

What does this mean for policy-making, and for the future of our politics? First, don’t assume yesterday’s battles are familiar. For example, millions vote today, some swinging elections, who don’t have a reflexive understanding of the effects of the licence-permit raj. When economic policy is discussed, explain it to them some other way. Second, it’s a reminder that long-simmering problems need to be given time to heal, and that history can be rendered irrelevant quicker than we can imagine: this is something that whoever is making Kashmir policy in Delhi, for example, needs to understand.

And for our politics? It needs to continually second-guess itself. More insulated leaderships should be more fearful: and doing this properly requires more than a website. (No, BJP, creating www.lkadvani.in does not make your leader automatically Obama-esque, regardless of how many of your press releases tell us it does.) We’ve heard a lot about how Rahul Gandhi’s handpicked candidates from the Youth Congress have done well this election; perhaps not because they’re young — never really a requirement in the Youth Congress — but because they were hand-picked. Somehow those naturally old, conservative institutions, our national parties, need to be projecting ideas of themselves that look tangibly ahead. It’s easy to attack Rahul Gandhi, for example, for not being a political natural or for not having the family charisma in sufficient quantity; but until everybody else seems to look ahead as much as he tries to, they’re going to be behind.

mihir.sharma@expressindia.com