Personally, I can barely manage to have a semi-intelligent conversation with anyone below the age of 30 an exception or two notwithstanding. The good news is that occasionally in the life of a commentator on contemporary issues, individual prejudice and objective assessment of an issue under discussion converge. At what age Indians ought to have the right to vote is one such.

For the first four decades of Independence, 21 was the age at which voting rights came into play for citizens; then came Rajiv Gandhi’s unleashing of the nation’s so-called youth potential and the voting age was lowered to 18 via the 61st Constitutional Amendment, 1988, which was passed into law in 1989. It’s been a downhill slide ever since.

Before arguing against it and indeed in favour of reversing this decision, however, it would be useful to highlight the lay of the land in this connection which has been expertly laid bare by Dr James McCue, Lecturer in Criminology and Psychology at the Edith Cowan University in Western Australia. In an article published last year, McCue points out that around the world, the idea of adulthood – when it happens and how it is defined – is being challenged.

In Australia, the Greens have introduced a bill to give 16/17-year olds the right to vote; Malaysia has announced the country may lower the voting age to 18 before the next elections; and Japan recently lowered its voting age from 20 to 18 for referenda, following the 2016 decision to lower the voting age in general elections. In particular, he points out, Japan’s decision was in part to address voter apathy and help young people feel more engaged in politics. But it may also signal that social views regarding the commencement of adulthood have shifted across the board, in effect becoming more dynamic in the definition of adulthood. McCue’s intervention in the debate, I hasten to add, is a persuasive argument in favour of lowering the age of voting.

Adulthood, as McCue iterates, has traditionally been defined by a combination of age and the achievement of social milestones and most countries have a legally defined age to determine when a person is considered an adult or has attained majority. In India, this is 21 years of age except in the highly discriminatory minimum age for marriage which is pegged at 18 for females but 21 for males, a problem that has largely been made redundant in the West given the welcome undermining of the institution of marriage as the only form of committed, long-term cohabitation. What is also not recognised enough in these parts is that becoming an adult is a process, with gradual increases in social responsibility, and not an event.

Rapid social changes, the hallmark of a society in transition, have accentuated the already chaotic ecology of contemporary India and have resulted in our expectations of young people and their levels of responsibility getting increasingly diverse. It has been brought out by experts that psychologically, age alone is an unreliable determinant of adulthood, as each individual varies in their rate of biological, cognitive and emotional development. The recognition of a new life stage – emerging adulthood – has been recommended by developmental psychologists to account for the changes to social milestones that have traditionally represented adulthood. The concept of “emerging adulthood” acknowledges the varied levels of independence exhibited by young people and reflects the process of personal development, writes McCue. So, if a more dynamic definition of adulthood is adopted, at what age is it reasonable to assign social responsibility and by implication voting rights to young people?

In the Indian context, that must be 25 for the Lok Sabha i.e. General Election, 21 for State Assembly polls and 18 for panchayat and urban local bodies.

If, as the psychological evidence suggests, the current approach in law of gradually increasing social responsibility for young people is prudent and accurately reflects the transitional nature of development to adulthood, the above is almost a categorical imperative. Young people in high arousal situations are at risk of making impulsive decisions up until their mid-20s; however, during times of low-emotional arousal, the reasoning abilities of young people are equivalent to adults, McCue’s research has shown.

Civic engagement and its concomitant notion of nurturing a sense of civic nationalism while subscribing to a sense of Indian exceptionalism premised on the idea of a non-supremacist Indic civilizational ethos is vital for citizens to have skin in the nation-building game, as it were. The nature of the adulthood of its citizenry, therefore, becomes vital in this endeavour to build a calmer, less frenetic and more reasoned political discourse.

The modified voting ages suggested here seek primarily to achieve a twin-objective: First, to make responsible citizenship aspirational and privilege it as an attainment not to be exercised lightly but only after mature introspection; secondly, to ensure that the voting system is structured to reflect a progressive increase in both rights and responsibilities. In the process, and at the risk of being accused of pushing a philosophy of allegedly enlightened paternalism, it protects younger co-citizens of the republic who are in the process of ‘finding themselves’ from acting upon the propaganda, rent-seeking and discourse that comprises the outreach architecture of all political parties including those on the extremes. The argument is not, it bears underlining, to prevent those in the 18-25 age bracket from believing and/or being receptive to whichever narrative tickles their fancy but to ensure that a cooling off period, in a sense, is in place before they act on their individual political predilections.

Then there is the independent economic contribution argument which, in the Indian context, where children in the mainstay in the parental home far longer than in developed Western democracies and function as autonomous citizens in the economic sphere at a later stage in life, usually by their mid-20s, cannot be ignored. And this holds true both in urban and small-town India across the middle class and lower/emerging middle class as well as in rural India where those dependent on agriculture tend to split landholdings between siblings to become independent economic units much later in life than at 18 or even 21.

There is, of course, the danger of a disconnect with democracy among the youth or ennui setting in due to a curbing of the participative impulse of younger citizens in elections, which is precisely why a progressive voting age scale is being suggested as opposed to a wholesale rollback.

In Mickey Mouse terms, the age of 18 is old enough for young adults to have a say in local governance; 21 to grapple with issues at the State-level and; 25 to engage with the national and international priorities of our nation-state. A radical departure is not being suggested, only a tiny bit of tweaking that may produce more than a tiny bit of change in how we elect those who govern us.

After all, if one needs to be 25, as one does, to stand as a candidate for the Lok Sabha election, on a parity of reasoning there is nothing wrong with the electorate also having that as the minimum qualification-age to vote in that poll. Similarly, 21 years of age, the minimum suggested for being eligible to vote in Assembly elections, is no different from the age requirement that was extant for 42 years to be eligible to vote in Lok Sabha and Assembly polls and it cannot be anybody’s argument that the Indian electorate did not use its ballot wisely and well despite much lower levels of education and prosperity. The 18-year-old threshold is apt for local polls to enable a rights-and responsibilities regime to boost robust grassroots democratic traditions and encourage electoral interface by the youth on everyday issues that impact them directly.

We do, sometimes, as a society, tend to swallow whole the knowledge claims of Western social science extending to management theory – that of disruption being a case in point, which is from where the idea of lowering the voting age to 18 emanated at least in part. It is time we began to bring to bear upon our public practices, procedures and institutions nuanced reasoning, operational nimbleness and theoretical sure-footedness to render moot the need for and traction generated by disruptions initiated by a self-seeking political class regardless of whether the Prime Minister is Rajiv Gandhi or Narendra Modi.

(The writer is an independent journalist and commentator based in New Delhi)