Newsrooms have found a new noun and cannot put it down: Gen Z, pronounced as if it were a party with a leader, a manifesto, a whip and a press secretary. Anchors deploy it the way they once deployed “the youth”. Politicians use it the way they use “the people”. Reporters slap it on whoever is holding a placard this week and call the segment done. Jantar Mantar was filled by mid-July.

Students sat in protest over a leaked examination, a cancelled NEET, a retest forced on millions, and a minister who simply would not go. On 20 July, a mass of people of all hues tried to walk towards Parliament. Police responded with tear gas and batons. Five days later, Dharmendra Pradhan resigned. This was the first cabinet exit in twelve years, extracted by street pressure and resolute determination. Then came the late-night Reels, the sudden “friends”, and, from the Red Fort on 15 August, a new phrase: dimaagi naxal. After the Jantar Mantar protests, it is impossible to watch television or YouTube, or to read a newspaper or a magazine, without being inundated with references to Gen Z. In truth, the commentary and so – called analysis that followed did two predictable things, and both were wrong.

It read the sit-in as a generational uprising. It read the phrase as either a surgical strike on ideology or an attack on thought itself. In both cases, it mistook a demographic category for mindset. A protest is a fact about a demand or a grievance. A birth year is a fact about demography. A security label is a fact about how power prefers to categorise its critics. Today, everyone treats a demographic as a worldview, yet nothing could be further from the truth. Two people born in 2003 can leave the same decade with opposing politics. One sits at Jantar Mantar. One is in a coaching centre, preparing for the very exam being contested. One thinks the protesters are entitled.

One cannot place Jantar Mantar on a map. All of them are Gen Z. None is more authentically Gen Z than the others. The cohort supplied the timeline. It did not dictate the mindset. We already know this, because we apply it correctly everywhere except in the present. Nobody treats “Boomer” as a single stance on the Emergency, liberalisation,........

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