Opinion: Opinion | Why India's Gen Z Is Done With Traditional Politicians

There is a peculiar kind of confidence that comes from mistaking noise for understanding. Walk into any political war room in India today and you will find strategists confidently explaining "the Gen Z mindset" through slide decks full of Instagram trends, reels, and hashtag campaigns - as if a generation's worldview can be reverse-engineered from its social media habits. This confidence is precisely the problem. India's political class believes it has cracked the code of its youngest voters. It has not. What it has cracked, at best, is their attention span for thirty seconds - not their trust, not their conviction, and certainly not their respect.The Manufactured Relevance TrapScroll through the last few years of political discourse in India and a pattern emerges: an extraordinary amount of energy spent on things that simply do not register with Gen Z's actual concerns. Renaming a city.