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.

... contd.