Parliament Has Learned Gen Z Slang. But Has it Learned to Listen to Them?

What happens when political institutions adopt a vocabulary after its original meaning has been stripped away?

When Indian politicians began reaching for Gen Z slang in a recent Lok Sabha debate, they were doing more than experimenting with vocabulary. They were borrowing a cultural/generational register.

(Photo: Vibhushita Singh/The Quint)

When Indian politicians began reaching for Gen Z slang in a recent Lok Sabha debate, they were doing more than experimenting with vocabulary. They were borrowing a cultural/generational register.

The question, then, is not simply why Parliament has begun speaking in the language of the internet, but what happens when political institutions adopt a vocabulary after its original meanings have already been stripped away.

This transformation is best read through Antonio Gramsci’s idea of incorporation: the process by which a dominant order absorbs the cultural forms of a subordinate group while detaching them from the histories of exclusion that produced them. The test case is “clock it.” 

Where “Clocking” Comes From

One important lineage of “clocking” runs through the ballroom culture built by Black and Latinx queer and transgender communities in New York in the mid-to-late twentieth century: a refuge from racism, homophobia, and transphobia, organised around Houses—chosen families led by “Mothers” and “Fathers”,  competing in categories from fashion and dance to “Realness,” in which walkers were judged on how convincingly they could embody a given identity, historically a survival skill for transgender and gay people passing through a hostile world.

Texas ballroom MC Jrock Ebony has described clocking as connecting the dots, working out that someone was concealing something. Going “unclocked,” in Ebony’s account, was bound up with literal safety, since being identified could cost someone a job, housing, or safety itself. Ebony frames the misuse of the phrase as part of a broader pattern: the community that built this vocabulary taught the wider internet what it means, and still, in his account, goes unrecognised as fully human for it.

The imperative “clock it,” now paired online with a finger-tap gesture, is a later extension of this vocabulary, internet shorthand for approval or recognition, rather than for the original act of detecting concealment. Parliament did not borrow the phrase from ballroom directly; what reached the Lok Sabha was an already-flattened, internet-mainstreamed version, routed through years of wider queer and internet-culture use and then through platforms like TikTok and Instagram before Indian legislators picked it up as generic approval-speak.

Call it an appropriation of an appropriation: a first flattening, as the phrase moved from a queer community’s survival vocabulary into generic internet approval-speak, and a second, smaller one, as its residual Anglophone youth-culture association was stripped out again by legislators reaching for a soundbite.

A Debate That Borrowed a Vocabulary

The occasion was the Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Amendment Bill, 2026, debated in the Lok Sabha on 28 July, 2026, amid weeks of youth protest, including the satirical Cockroach Janta Party, a movement launched on May 16, 2026, the day after Chief Justice of India Surya Kant compared unemployed young people to “cockroaches” during a Supreme Court hearing, before the movement turned its attention to the leaked NEET-UG 2026 medical entrance exam and culminated in a July 20 march on Parliament.

Piloting the Bill, Minister of State for Personnel Jitendra Singh argued that paper leaks were nothing new, citing instances under earlier governments, and credited the Modi government with finishing what he called an “unfinished task”.

Shiv Sena MP Shrikant Shinde supplied some of the debate’s most quoted lines, summing up the protests “in Gen Z language”: the Opposition, he said, had been “MIA (missing in action)” for the first 37 days, then developed “FOMO (fear of missing out)” and demonstrated outside the Prime Minister’s residence, before turning “delulu (delusional)” in expecting the protesting students to join them.

BJP’s Bansuri Swaraj used “clock it” not for young people’s recognition of the Bill but for the government’s own: “Where Congress created a policy vacuum, Modi clocked it, if I may borrow the language of Gen Z, and created a solution.” Her party colleague Tejasvi Surya used “delulu” to dismiss the idea that the Opposition had youth on its side.

Congress’s Deepender Singh Hooda answered with the protest’s own coinages, “waste-guna-huiya” and “kuchu puchu”. NCP(SP)’s Supriya Sule, used the register, telling Surya directly not to be “delulu” that the youth were with him. Between them, government and Opposition MPs were not so much talking to Gen Z as performing fluency in its register while arguing over who actually spoke for it.

Whose Gen Z, and in What Language

Two separate questions sit underneath the borrowed vocabulary: who in India identifies with “Gen Z” at all, and who has access to the specific, Anglophone-inflected register Parliament performed. The answers complicate each other.

On the first: an Ipsos survey found that only 8 percent of Indians said they were aware of the term “Gen Z” at all; asked separately which generation they belonged to, 61 percent could not place themselves in any generational cohort, and just 3 percent identified as Gen Z. 

On the second: meme-literate slang presupposes particular forms of platform exposure and linguistic familiarity that only a fraction of India’s youth possess in this specific form. The 2011 Census found that 10.2 percent of Indians spoke English in any capacity. Yet by late 2025 rural India held the majority of active internet users, some 548 million people, growing nearly four times faster than urban India  which complicates any easy assumption that internet access tracks English fluency.

So the more precise claim isn’t that Gen Z slang reaches only urban English speakers; young Indians code-switch into English-inflected internet vocabulary through Hindi meme culture, reels, and gaming in ways one can not quantify. The claim is narrower: political elites are selecting one particular, English-dominant slice of youth culture and presenting it as though it spoke for Indian Gen Z as a whole. The language projects “Gen Z” as a coherent political bloc from outside, while actually addressing a much narrower slice of the country than the label implies.

There is a further problem for anyone writing about this, including this essay: English-language commentary on Indian youth is produced for and by audiences close to the same vocabulary Parliament performed.

What was transferred when this vocabulary reached the Lok Sabha was not simply a set of words, but a style of political communication: easily reproduced, readily detachable from its histories, and perfectly suited to a news cycle that runs on soundbites. What was left behind was both the particular histories embedded in some of those terms and the much larger diversity of young Indians for whom that register is neither native nor representative.

The problem, then, is not that Parliament used “clock it” incorrectly, or that politicians should never use youth slang. It is that a string of borrowed expressions, “MIA”, “FOMO”, “delulu”, “clock it”, and even the Opposition’s counter-slang, can create the appearance of generational intimacy without requiring the harder work of understanding the generation being addressed. The language makes “Gen Z” appear more culturally coherent, more linguistically uniform, and more politically legible than it actually is.

This is what incorporation looks like in practice: the form survives while the histories, inequalities and differences that produced it recede from view. The democratic task is therefore not to make Parliament sound younger. It is to make political listening deeper: to ask what a policy actually costs the people it claims to speak for, how those people describe that cost themselves, and whether the language of political representation has mistaken familiarity with a vocabulary for understanding the lives behind it.

(The author is Legislative Assistants to Members of Parliament (LAMP) Fellow 2025 - PRS Legislative. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)