Not thinking politically is the most political choice you can make today.
In an age of algorithmic opinions and ready-made ideologies, party loyalty often replaces political thinking. This blog is about resisting that comfort—about choosing critique over camps, responsibility over allegiance, and ethical vigilance over ideological certainty.
We live in a time when not thinking politically is itself a deeply political choice. The everyday rhythms of our lives—what we consume, how we communicate, what we fear, what we ignore—are increasingly scripted by social media capital, market logics, and algorithmic reason. In such a moment, political vigilance is no longer a specialised activity reserved for party workers or activists; it is an ethical demand placed on every citizen.
Yet paradoxically, this is also an age that rewards ideological laziness. It is easier to float along with a herd, to inherit ready-made political labels, to pledge lifelong loyalty to a camp and outsource critical thinking to party spokespersons. Such allegiance often passes off as political commitment, but in reality it is a profoundly apolitical position—one that replaces engagement with identity, and inquiry with comfort.
Political philosophers have repeatedly warned us against uncritical allegiance to any system. Still, around us, we see precisely the opposite: people defining themselves through parties rather than interrogating them. Politics becomes a badge to wear, not a responsibility to carry.
Inherited Politics and Early Conditioning
My own political sensibility was not born in abstraction. It was shaped at home.
My father began his career as an officer in the Sales Tax Department in the 1980s and was a committed follower of the Congress party, particularly of Shri K. Karunakaran. Even when the party went through internal tremors, his allegiance remained steadfast. He also served as the General Secretary of a gazetted officers’ service organisation aligned with the Congress.
With extended family members sharing similar political commitments, I grew up absorbing these affiliations almost unconsciously. Political discussions between my father and me were a regular feature of everyday life. By the time I gained the right to vote at eighteen, my political preferences were already quietly conditioned—not through propaganda, but through familiarity.
Until my early twenties, my political thinking flowed comfortably along these inherited lines.
The Shock of Critical Thought
The rupture came when I joined for doctoral research. My research supervisor—who has since played a seminal role in shaping my intellectual life—introduced me to a radically different mode of political thinking. Engaging seriously with Marxist critiques of economic relations and social inequality was not merely an academic exercise; it was an unsettling experience. It demanded that I interrogate assumptions I had never thought to question.
Breaking open the doors of a safe ideological home is neither easy nor immediate. Unsurprisingly, when I joined my first job, I gravitated towards the service organisation affiliated with the Congress. Political habits, especially those inherited early, do not dissolve overnight.
But from the age of twenty-three onwards, something began to shift. I started noticing gaps—blind spots—in the political discourse I had inherited. This was not a rejection of my father’s values. On the contrary, he possessed a remarkable critical sensibility and a deep intolerance for injustice. Yet I began to see that no political vision, however principled, is ever complete.
I also came to believe that claims of absolute rupture from one’s political past are often disingenuous. Total erasure of childhood political affinities is a myth—sometimes even a strategic one, crafted by those adept at ideological self-reinvention.
Living with Contradictions
By the time I completed my PhD at twenty-eight, my political sensibility had been shaped by two distinct lineages: my father’s lived ethics and my supervisor’s insistence on structural critique. For me, the question was never about choosing one over the other, but about learning to live with the tensions between them.
Over the years, as I moved across institutions and roles, I eventually became part of a Left service organisation. But even here, my engagement remained conditional, reflective, and uneasy. I sometimes ask myself whether I would have continued in the Congress-affiliated organisation had my father still been alive. I do not have a clear answer—and perhaps that uncertainty itself is honest.
Kerala, New Alignments, and Political Recalibration
The last decade in Kerala has witnessed a significant reconfiguration of political discourse, particularly with the emergence of the NDA as a visible force. For much of my life, political identity in the state was shaped by a familiar bi-party framework. Many people close to me once defined themselves squarely within that binary.
Today, that certainty has fractured. New alignments have forced even long-settled citizens to renegotiate their political situatedness. The question is no longer simply which side are you on? but how do you think politically in a time of shifting power?
Politics Without Blind Loyalty
Looking back now—with the benefit of philosophical training and lived experience—I find it increasingly impossible to confine my politics within party labels. This is not political indifference. It is political responsibility.
My sense of social justice demands that I acknowledge progressive measures wherever they emerge:
The Right to Information Act (2005) empowered citizens to challenge bureaucratic opacity.
Social welfare pension schemes in Kerala have tangibly improved the lives of vulnerable populations.
The Jan Aushadhi initiative has made affordable generic medicines accessible amid aggressive healthcare corporatisation.
These measures emerged from different political configurations. They deserve recognition not because of who introduced them, but because of what they enabled.
The same critical framework must also be used to interrogate failures, exclusions, and contradictions within these very systems.
The Courage to Say the Emperor Has No Clothes
To me, democracy survives not on loyalty, but on critique. Only a politically alert citizen—one who refuses to surrender critical thinking to any party—can demand accountability from those in power. Declaring that “the emperor has no clothes” is not betrayal; it is civic duty.
If we accept that no individual can be always right or always wrong, why do we refuse to apply the same logic to political parties—after all, collectives of fallible citizens?
To remain unapologetically political today is not to wear a label with pride. It is to stay restless, critical, and ethically awake—especially when certainty feels most seductive.
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