SOURCE :- SIASAT NEWS
Hyderabad: Telangana Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president N Ramchander Rao has rejected the term “Gen Z,” calling it a construct pushed by “Urban Naxals and ultra-leftists” rather than a genuine generational identity.
In a video statement made before his hunger strike over pending student fee reimbursements, which began on Monday, August 24, Rao said, “There is no word called Gen Z. There is no community called Gen Z. It is a creation of Urban Naxals and ultra-leftists. There is only Yuva (youth) and Yuva Bharath.”
The remark is the latest in a series of comments Rao has made this year targeting how India’s youth is described and mobilised. In June, he accused the newly formed Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) of being an “urban Naxal” front backed by the Aam Aadmi Party and philanthropist George Soros, while insisting that Gen Z “identifies with the Indian ethos” and would not fall for such messaging. Later that month, addressing the NaMo GenZ Conclave in Hyderabad, he told young people that “Gen Z stands with Modi,” framing the debate as one of nationalism versus “imported protest culture.”
In July, he went further, accusing Congress, Left parties and student unions such as SFI, AISF and ASA of conspiring with “ultra-left and soft-left groups” to foment unrest, drawing comparisons to recent upheavals in Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
Rao’s latest comments align with a broader push within Sangh Parivar-linked circles to reframe the discourse around India’s youth. RSS-affiliated publication Organiser has run pieces this month arguing that “India does not have a Gen Z,” describing the term as foreign terminology that reduces the country’s youth to “a demographic statistic in a global spreadsheet,” and calling instead for the youth to be seen through indigenous frameworks tied to Bharat’s civilisational identity.
The government’s own youth engagement platform, Mera Yuva Bharat (MY Bharat), launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2023, uses similar language, positioning itself as a vehicle for “youth-led development” under the Viksit Bharat 2047 vision.
Rao, a senior advocate and former MLC who took charge of the Telangana BJP in July 2025, has a long history with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)-affiliated Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), having led its counter-mobilisation against Left-leaning student politics at Osmania University in the 1980s.
Critics have time and again pushed back on the “urban Naxal” framing more broadly, noting the term has been used since at least the past decade to describe left-leaning intellectuals, academics and activists, and has drawn accusations of being deployed to delegitimise dissent.
SOURCE : SIASAT
