Should children be involved in political campaigning?

What is your immediate take on this issue?

Andrew Sesuraj: First of all, children do have the right to participate in politics. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child makes this clear. The problem here lies in the last leg of the election campaign. After actor Vijay appealed to young people to insist that their parents vote for his symbol, the whistle, saying, in effect, “pester your parents and elders to vote for the whistle, just as you pester them for a well-known chocolate brand”, I saw a large number of videos that same day of children at home arguing with their parents and the adults in their families that they should vote for Mr. Vijay and the whistle.

On polling day, I checked with some people about whom they had voted for. They said, “I voted for the whistle.” When I asked why, they said, “My son asked me,” or “My daughter asked me,” or “My granddaughter asked me.” They voted simply because the children pestered them. If my child speaks about school, about the food at school and at home, about the clothes she wears, the games she plays, or about going out to play on the playground, all of that matters, because these things affect her directly. What matters is whose voice they are speaking in. They should not be tutored.

Anil Pillai: This is a very common method in consumer marketing. You release campaigns and incentives aimed at children so that they will pester their parents and elders into making particular purchasing decisions for the household. What we are seeing now is a crossover from consumer marketing into electoral marketing, where a campaign tries to influence voters’ behaviour this way. If you stop and examine the proposed influence pathway, it runs like this. The child has an attachment to a celebrity. That attachment produces enthusiasm in the child. The enthusiasm then leads to the pester effect, or “pester power” as it’s usually called: repeated requests to the parents. And that, in turn, puts pressure on their voting choices. Such a campaign is not merely persuading a voter; it is recruiting someone the voter loves to carry forward the persuasion.

Should children be involved in political campaigning at all?

AP: To my mind, we must draw a useful distinction between helping children develop a political voice and using their voice to deliver an adult’s predetermined message. The UNICEF’s participation framework explicitly distinguishes between genuine participation and manipulation and tokenism. While children have a right to a political voice, they should not be turned into instruments of political persuasion.

I find this method of election marketing quite disturbing. Typically, a candidate goes to voters and says, “You should vote for me, and here are the reasons why. This is who I am today, this is what I will do tomorrow, and this is why you should support me.” Here the route is indirect. The message is: “Someone you love wants you to support me.” To my mind, that is highly manipulative and very problematic.

But isn’t that fairly common in campaigning? With adults, too, it’s the same thing, isn’t it?

AP: No, it isn’t, because adults have agency. In many households, siblings, spouses and parents vote for different candidates in the same election, because each of them has agency. A grandchild does not have the agency to convince their grandfather on the merits of a candidate. The appeal is purely emotional: “I love this person for X, Y and Z, so if you love me, you should support him.” It’s a kind of perverse law of transitivity at play.

AS: Democracy cannot be strengthened on emotions. It depends on informed choices; choices you actually believe in.

Section 123 of the Representation of the People Act deals with undue influence. The petitioner argued that telling children to persuade their parents to vote for the TVK or Mr. Vijay was an instance of undue influence. The law says it would amount to undue influence if it reached the point of tyranny over the mind, overpowering the volition [of the voter]. However, the court said that adults had a choice.

AP: There are two parts to this. Part A is whether the election was manipulated in any way, which the court said it could find no evidence of. Part B is whether it is good for the child to be involved in such practices, which I think is what we are really discussing. It most certainly is not in line with best practices for child development.

AS: The point is that the way he put it is, in itself, undue pressure on children, because children are already connected to the actor through his films and songs. Even today you can see children who cannot recite nursery rhymes reciting songs from his films. As the judgment says, we cannot prove whether people voted the way they did because of it. I am speaking about the persuasion itself. Even if it had failed, the persuasion would be undue.

The day after the election, I saw more videos of children waking up and asking, “Has Vijay mama (uncle) won?” The parents would say, “No, counting hasn’t started yet.” And the children would say, “I won’t eat until mama becomes Chief Minister.” This shows that the persuasion had an impact.

Mr. Andrew mentioned how Mr. Vijay referred to a particular brand of chocolate. Is that the test for any campaign, commercial or political: making something so compelling that people ask for it, clamour for it? Is that easier to do with children?

AP: Yes, that is the holy grail for any product or person: to get into the consideration set of the audience in such a way that they crave it or endorse it. And it isn’t only children; adults do it all the time too. To use a very unscientific term, if you know the right buttons to press, manipulating people who lack agency is much easier, whether they are children, people with Stockholm syndrome, or ideologically brainwashed people.

If you do not have a sense of agency and cannot make decisions on the basis of data, informed choices and comparisons, you can be brainwashed rather easily.

But can there be a law banning political parties from campaigning among children? Adults have choices. Would getting children to persuade the adult voter, their parent, amount to tyranny over the voter’s mind?

AS: Yes, we should have a law, but it has to be very precisely drawn. We cannot say children should not participate or should not have a voice, because that is their right. But who makes use of that voice? That is what matters.

AP: The behavioural concern is not that children have political opinions. It is that adults may be recruiting children’s affection to influence another adult’s vote. Helping children develop a voice certainly strengthens their agency. But scripting them as campaign messengers serves the campaign’s agenda. So it is not so much about tyranny over the mind as it is about agency, which is the inalienable right of every human being on this planet, small or big, old or young. If you impinge on that sense of agency, that is problematic. If you have child labour laws, why can’t you have child campaigning laws?

Picture this scenario: a child features in a video. The child grows up, becomes an adolescent or an adult, and regrets that video. But the internet never forgets; the video is there forever.

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