Abvp Shravan B Raj Chhatra Udghosh Gen Z Lion Cockroach Janta Party Cjp

“GEN Z in India does not want to be cockroaches; they want to be lions,” the RSS’s student body’s national secretary Shravan B Raj said on Friday, in an apparent indirect reference to the Jantar Mantar protests led by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP).

Raj was speaking at the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP)’s Chhatra Udghosh (Voice of Students) event organised on Friday.

“In the past, political parties viewed student power as a nuisance. ABVP changed that perspective. Student power is not a nuisance; it is the nation’s power”, he said.

According to Raj, Gen Z “constitutes around 24 per cent of the global population” and he also claimed that India has 374 million Gen Z youths. “By 2047, this generation would be India’s driving force,” he said.

At the event to announce the new executive body of the ABVP for 2026-27, outgoing secretary for the Ahmedabad unit Dhrumil Akhani said, “Some people are trying to make this youth capital of ours – Gen Z – their tool. Such forces are misleading young people.”

Akhani linked the event to World Entrepreneurship Day (August 21) and said young people needed to rethink their relationship with employment. “India’s youths, today’s Gen Z, should not just be a job taker, but a giver and, along with being a giver, become a job creator,” he said.

For Raj, the role models for this generation were not contemporary influencers or entrepreneurs but young figures from India’s freedom struggle, including Khudiram Bose, Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Rajguru, Kanaklata Barua and Pritilata Waddedar.

He cited an ABVP campaign in Tirupur, Tamil Nadu, as an example. Claiming that automation in the textile industry resulted in “job losses and suicides among workers”, he said ABVP students chose to support local weavers by wearing locally made clothes on campus once a week. Raj described the initiative as “true social transformation”.

The newly appointed Ahmedabad unit Secretary, Priyam Bhatiya, calling himself a “Gen Z worker”, said, “I request all Gen Z youth that this Gen Z belongs to India, to the nation, and works for ABVP.”

Bhatiya said ABVP would seek to expand its presence across campuses, particularly where executive bodies had not yet been formed. State Secretary Devansh Brahmbhatt described the organisation as a space for “character building and value-based grooming”, saying young people were like “tender saplings” during their student years and needed direction to grow into “strong trees”.

(Kalindi Jha is an intern at The Indian Express, Ahmedabad)