By turning legitimate student anger into a personal aesthetic complaint, the Mandi MP has exposed the emptiness of her own public life far more than any Gen Z reel ever could.
There is a special kind of political bankruptcy that reveals itself not in policy failure but in the language chosen to dismiss the young. Kangana Ranaut, actor, BJP Member of Parliament from Mandi, and self-appointed cultural referee, has once again demonstrated that bankruptcy with surgical precision. In a series of Instagram posts that reek of class anxiety and patriarchal entitlement, she labelled an entire generation the “Generation Gutter,” declared protest videos “puke-inducing,” and reserved particular venom for young women she found “so ugly and corrupt that they can’t even be homemakers.” The remarks, delivered with the theatrical flourish of someone who confuses volume for substance, have rightly triggered widespread backlash. They deserve nothing less than a full-throated repudiation.
The Anatomy of a Smear
Let us be clear about what happened. Students and young people, organised in significant measure under the banner of the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), protested the NEET paper leak scandal and the broader rot in the examination system. Their agitation contributed to the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. The methods were noisy, meme-heavy, irreverent, and deliberately theatrical. Some language was crude. Some visuals were deliberately unpolished. That is what street politics often looks like when the powerful refuse to listen until the noise becomes unbearable.
Ranaut’s response was not an argument about policy, integrity of examinations, or the right to protest. It was a visceral aesthetic rejection. “Never in my life I have seen so much ugliness in one place,” she wrote. “These reels from GenZ protests are puke inducing… ewwww who is birthing and raising them?” She went further, singling out “so-called westernised Indian women” and branding them “Generation Gutter.” Some, she claimed, “are not good at studies but they are so ugly and corrupt that they can’t be home makers either,” yet they “proudly flaunt their freedom to have drugs, drinks or endless body counts and shamelessly live off their parents’ earnings.”
This is not political critique. This is the language of a social superior inspecting the lower orders and finding them aesthetically and morally deficient. It is the vocabulary of someone who believes public life is a beauty pageant and a finishing school rolled into one, and who panics when the participants refuse to play by those rules.
Who Exactly Is Unfit?
The personal insults directed at young women are particularly grotesque coming from an elected representative. To declare that certain women are “too ugly” for marriage or homemaking is not a cultural observation; it is a textbook exercise in patriarchal policing. It reduces female political participation to a question of marriageability and domestic utility. The same woman who has spent years projecting herself as a fierce, independent force now measures other women’s worth by their desirability as wives and their competence in the kitchen. The contradiction is so stark it borders on self-parody.
There is also the casual equation of protest with moral degeneracy. Drugs, drinks, “endless body counts.” These are the stock phrases of moral panic deployed against any generation that refuses to accept inherited authority without interrogation. Ranaut offers no evidence, no data, no sociological insight—only the sneer of someone who has decided that dissent itself is evidence of corruption. When young people mock power, the powerful reach for the oldest weapons: shame the women, pathologise the youth, and declare the entire cohort unfit for the nation.
The CJP Spokesperson and the Politics of Dismissal
Ranaut did not stop at the anonymous crowd. She turned her fire on CJP spokesperson Saurav Das questioning his age, his claim to student status, and dismissing him as “useless and unemployed.” The personalisation is telling. When the substance of the protest is too inconvenient to address—paper leaks, institutional failure, the human cost of a broken examination system—the easier path is to attack the messenger’s résumé and lifestyle. Das’s retort that even members of Ranaut’s own party do not take her seriously landed with uncomfortable accuracy. The subsequent exchange only confirmed that the MP prefers character assassination to engagement.
Accountability Cuts Both Ways
Ranaut is fond of lecturing others about “accountability.” An independent life, she insists, must be earned. Fair enough. Let us apply the same standard. She is a sitting Member of Parliament. Her words carry institutional weight. When she describes citizens exercising their constitutional right to protest as filth, garbage, and ugliness, she is not a private citizen venting on social media. She is a public representative telling a generation that their presence in public space is an offence to her sensibilities.
The same standard of accountability requires noting what Ranaut did not say. There was no sustained scrutiny of the examination system that produced the crisis. No demand for systemic reform. No acknowledgment of the students who paid with their futures or, in some tragic cases, their lives. The outrage was reserved exclusively for the tone and appearance of those who forced the issue onto the national stage. That selectivity is not principle. It is convenience.
The Larger Pattern
This is not an isolated outburst. Ranaut has built a public brand on combative cultural nationalism that frequently collapses into personal invective. The pattern is consistent: when confronted with messy democratic energy from below, respond with aesthetic disgust and moral superiority. The result is a politics that confuses refinement with legitimacy and politeness with patriotism. Democracies do not require their citizens to be photogenic or grammatically pure. They require them to be heard.
Gen Z did not invent irreverence. They inherited a political culture that has too often treated young people as either vote banks or cultural threats. Their memes, posters, and rough language are responses to that treatment, not the cause of national decline. To call them a “gutter generation” is to confess that one has no better argument.
The Real Distortion
Ranaut ended one of her posts with a “gentle reminder”: independent life needs to be earned; without accountability one is merely a “distorted entity.” The irony writes itself. Few things are more distorted than an elected representative reducing a generation’s political expression to a question of personal hygiene and marriage prospects. Few things are less accountable than using the platform of Parliament to sneer at citizens who forced a minister’s resignation over a national examination scandal.
The backlash has been swift and deserved. Opposition voices, social media users, and ordinary citizens have called out the remarks for what they are: classist, sexist, and politically empty. That backlash is not “cancel culture.” It is the basic democratic insistence that public officials do not get to dehumanise the public without consequence.
Kangana Ranaut is entitled to her aesthetic preferences. She is not entitled to convert those preferences into a political doctrine that brands an entire generation as refuse. The gutter, in this episode, is not where the protesters stand. It is the level to which public discourse sinks when power chooses contempt over argument. The young people she disparaged have already demonstrated something she has not: the willingness to organise, persist, and extract accountability from a system that preferred their silence. That is not gutter behaviour. That is citizenship.
~Hasnain Naqvi is a former member of the history faculty at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai….
The opinions expressed here are solely those of the author.
