Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat had a lot to say in his special outreach to the current generation, labelled GenZ, Wednesday in Mumbai.

Without going into what Bhagwat’s message was, this RSS initiative in the wake of the students protests across the country sparked by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) at New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, is slipping into a spurious, fallacious and politically-socially nefarious duality and dichotomy manufactured by the Left and its allies.

The RSS seems to have accepted that the Indian polity has come to be divided into GenZ and the rest. It has come to accept that there is a disconnect between the rest of India and the GenZ, and that the latter are ranged against the RSS, Hindutva, BJP, against their parents, who obviously belong to previous generations.

Linguistic deconstruction of Bhagwat’s statements betrays this.

“A sense of belonging and mutual respect is needed for dialogue to take place. We need to recognise and respect each other. Only then can meaningful dialogue happen, where we understand their concerns and they understand our perspective,” Bhagwat said, while addressing Gen Z and Gen Alpha attendees at a conference on ‘The Role of Youth in Uniting the World, the Indian Way’ in Mumbai.

What this implies is that the GenZ does not respect the RSS, and by extension is ill at ease with Hindutva or the dominant reigning vision of Bharat that the RSS has proffered for decades. Bhagwat seems to suggest and accept that there is no dialogue between GenZ and RSS, and that GenZ does not understand its ideology (“our perspective”), much less aligned to it.

But, this creates a conundrum. If the void between the GenZ and others in India was so deep and vast, then how it is that just before the CJP protests flooded the social media timelines of Indians of all ages, Indians of all generations were proudly celebrating the totally GenZ phenomenon of ‘Bhajan........

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