Bharat at 2047 is not built on barricades. It is built in classrooms, laboratories, boardrooms, farms, and yes, in voting booths. The ‘Suvarn Kaal’ does not wait for those busy performing revolution for an audience that does not have Bharat’s interests at heart. – Yuvraj Pokharna

Let me speak directly to my Gen-Z, the Yuva of Bharat. That is the generation I write for, argue for, and refuse to give up on. You are being played! Not by the government. Not by the system, but by a well-oiled, well-funded, ideologically rehearsed ecosystem—one with a singular agenda—to manufacture a generation of permanent protesters out of a generation that was born to build.

India is growing at a pace that is forcing even the IMF to revise its numbers upward. This very quarter, the Fund was compelled to upgrade India’s growth projection from 6.5 per cent to 7 per cent. From sui to space, from UPI to ISRO, the Bharat growth story is not a government press release. It is documented, data-backed, and a globally acknowledged reality. The Indian Yuva is at the centre of that story as engineers, entrepreneurs, coders, creators, and contributors to a civilisation reclaiming its rightful place. And yet, someone wants you on the street instead.

Let us be clear about something. India has earned its revolutions. The rebellion against British colonial plunder was not anarchy; it was civilisational self-defence. The JP Andolan against Indira Gandhi’s Emergency was not disorder, it was democracy fighting back against a despotic ruler who had strangled the Constitution with her own hands. Those were different times, drastic times: times when the protest was the only constitutional tool left standing. Those times are not these times. When a democratically elected government is functioning within its full constitutional mandate, when the judiciary is not just intact but actively engaged, when elections are held on schedule, when the EVM remains the most powerful instrument of change available to every single citizen, anarchy dressed in the language of constitutionalism is not resistance. It is sabotage.

Look at the pattern. Because there is always a pattern. JNU erupts and two faces emerge for national primetime: Kanhaiya Kumar and Umar Khalid. The anti-CAA protests ignite and Sharjil Imam arrives, complete with his maps and his proposals for cutting the Northeast off from Bharat. Jamia burns and the ecosystem gifts us its heroes. And now, from the current round of mobilisation, we are being asked to accept Neha Bora—after the July rounds of protests that gave us cockroaches or so they would like to call themselves—AISA president, Rahul Gandhi’s new poster girl, and Marxist agitator as the new youth icon of India.

Rai ka pahad banana. A trimmed fingernail elevated into a certificate of martyrdom.

Here is what Bora actually said on record, in a video address to the Socialist Students’ Front conference in Bangladesh: “We know that the Gen-Z movement that we are seeing everywhere in this country first started in Bangladesh. Congratulations to you for showing us the way.” Bangladesh. A country where a student-led uprising led to over 500 deaths, forced a prime minister to flee, and plunged a neighbouring nation into chaos. That is the model being held up for your inspiration, Gen Z of Bharat.

And standing alongside her at a press conference at the Press Club of India today, senior advocate Prashant Bhushan said this – also on record: “There will definitely be a regime change. We all want a regime change.”

Not at the ballot box. Not through elections. Through the street. When Bangladeshi anarchists and Pakistani handles applaud these protests, what exactly are they celebrating? India’s democratic health? Or India’s destabilisation? The foreign connection is not a conspiracy theory. It is a documented, observable, consistent feature of every manufactured uprising this ecosystem has produced.

The government’s decision to denotify Jantar Mantar as a protest venue and redirect demonstrations to Ramlila Maidan is being spun as petrification. Let us apply basic logic here. Ramlila Maidan is the same ground where JP Narayan stood and shook a despotic government to its foundations. If the government were afraid of protest, it would not have designated one of the most historically significant protest grounds in the nation’s memory as the space for dissent.

It has not banned protest. It has maintained constitutional order. And if at any point it overstepped that mandate, the judiciary, neither absent nor captured, would have intervened. It has not needed to. Because the government has not overstepped.

My Gen-Z, let me say this with the love and the sharpness that this moment demands.

You are not the problem. You are the target.

This ecosystem needs your energy, your numbers, your social media fluency, and your genuine frustration with real issues—issues that matter and resonate with the youths—to fuel a political project that has nothing to do with your future and everything to do with its own survival.

Neha Bora did not build anything for you. Neither does she intend to. And that Yogendra Yadav, born as Salim Yadav—who declared “Sansad se nahi, sadak se faisla hoga”—is not fighting for your future. Prashant Bhushan, who wants regime change through the street and has previously spoken of revolution and bloodshed, is not your ally. They are using you. Do not be the fuel for someone else’s fire. If the government has failed you on any count—and no government is above that accountability—your weapon is the ballot. That is the most powerful instrument of peaceful, civilisational revolution ever designed. JP used the street because the ballot box had been suspended. You have not been robbed of yours. Use it.

Bharat at 2047 is not built on barricades. It is built in classrooms, laboratories, boardrooms, farms, and yes, in voting booths. The ‘Suvarn Kaal’ does not wait for those busy performing revolution for an audience that does not have Bharat’s interests at heart. You are not here to live in ‘delulu’. You are not here to merely find the ‘solulu’. You are here to become it. – News18, 20 October 2026

› Yuvraj Pokharna is a Surat-based educator, columnist, and social activist. He is the author of the book Hindutva For Gen Z.