Punjab elections 2017: AAP workers like Ruby built young teams for a 'ground-up' campaign.
27-year-old Rupinder Kaur Ruby is a political novice but her message was clear: jobs for young people. At a rally, the law student grabbed the microphone to tell a few hundred supporters in a dusty village square in Punjab that the ruling parties had failed them. "Punjab is not in a good place. And the youth are the most affected. They want to fight back," she said, raising her fist to cheers, as the crowd covered her in garlands before heading off to canvass for votes.
Ruby is one of several inexperienced candidates that the Aam Aadmi Party, headed by Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, chose to tap anger among an increasingly aspirational but frustrated youth of Punjab, which voted on Saturday.
The young in Punjab have been hit hardest by factory shutdowns, amid allegations that corruption has hastened the economic decline of the relatively rich state of 28 million people that borders Pakistan.
Unemployment tops voter concerns there, according to a recent poll, and young people are less and less willing to work their parents' fields in the state known as India's "bread basket".
Ruby's party is most popular among the young, reflecting a generational shift in India that poses a problem for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Nearly two-thirds of India's 1.3 billion people are under 35 - a demographic "bulge" that will create the world's largest working-age population before 2050.
Despite average annual economic growth of 6.5 percent between 1991 and 2013, India added less than half the jobs needed to absorb new entrants into the workforce.
The incumbent Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) party that rules Punjab alongside PM Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party, and the Congress, have governed the state alternately for decades with a focus on Sikhism, the state's dominant religion, and farm subsidies.
Those priorities resonate less among the young, and now all the main parties are promising free smartphones and Rs 2,500 a month for the unemployed.
"The other parties are all the same," said 30-year-old Jaskaran Sharma, who works as a truck driver in the Middle East and was helping with Ruby's campaign in between jobs.
"She is energetic, and young people understand the system," he told news agency Reuters in the village of Teona.
Punjab's official unemployment rate in 2015/16, at 6 per cent, was above the national average of 5 per cent, according to the Labour Bureau, although economists say the figures do not reflect the true picture.
Levels of underemployment are higher; only 17 per cent of Punjab's population earns a regular wage.
AAP workers like Ruby, daughter of a local government retiree, built young teams to fan out across villages and campaign door-to-door.
"We depend on our volunteers. This is a ground-up campaign," she told Reuters over tea and biscuits, while young men snapped photos with her.
Ruby has the lowest declared wealth, at 1.75 lakhs, of any candidate in the state, according to reports. The 10 poorest candidates are from AAP, although the party has also chosen several well-off politicians as candidates.
"The youth are looking for change, and for that they are going to take a risk with AAP," said Ashutosh Kumar, a professor of political science at Panjab University.
(With inputs from Reuters)