Being apolitical in India is a luxury and an illusion | LME 171 | Pooja Prasanna

How many times have you heard someone say

"I don’t get into politics. I just focus on my career"

Or when there are protests, you hear people ask, "Why does everything have to be politicized?"

It may sound balanced. But let us be honest for a second.

In India, being "apolitical" is a luxury. It is also an illusion, and frankly, it is impossible.

Every week on Let Me Explain, we break down complex things—a law, a court judgment, or a government policy. 

But today, I want to make a simple submission. Being apolitical is plain laziness, and complaining about "politicizing" an issue, any issue, is complete hogwash.

Let me explain.

Sitting on the fence is not neutrality. It is a decision, a choice. You are deciding to back the status quo.

Politics is not restricted to Parliament or election rallies. 

Politics is the price of your groceries. 

It is the quality of the air in your lungs, the speed of your Wi-Fi, the fairness of your exams, and whether you get home safely at night.

When you say, "I’m not interested in politics," you are actually saying, "The system works fine enough for me, so I don't need to care."

That is just privilege.

It is the privilege, of caste and class, of not being worried that those who are drunk on power will not come for you.  

It is the privilege of living in a decent or good house with private water tankers, diesel power backups.

It is not caring how bad the education system in the country is because you can just send your kids abroad. 

It is the luxury of not being hit by price raise and food inflation. Or the rate of unemployment. 

Comedian Vir Das put it quite well recently: saying you are apolitical is not an ideology. It is just comfort. Detachment is a luxury for the well-fed.

Before I go ahead, a quick pause. 

This is festival season and many of you are celebrating the triumph of good over evil, here’s something worth thinking about. Who gets to decide what is good, what is evil, and who gets to define the battle?

Those are political questions too.

So this festive season, don’t just celebrate- instead ask questions about the world we live in, the people who govern us, and the choices that shape our lives.

And as you spend on festivities, also spend on good journalism.

Like LME? Support the show: https://rzp.io/rzp/support-lme

Like our journalism? Become a subscriber: https://www.thenewsminute.com/subscription

Now back to the story. 

We have to make a distinction here. Some people disconnect from events around them because they are exhausted. 

Many in marginalized communities often step back because of fatigue and systemic despair. 

But when well-off citizens stay silent, that is voluntary. It leaves the people who are actually hurting to fight the machinery alone.

For most Indians, politics is not an intellectual pastime. It is immediate material survival.

And it is not new. 

Look at how this country was actually built. Our independence movement was grounded in one idea: everyday life is deeply political.

In 1930, Mahatma Gandhi wanted to rally millions against the British Empire. 

He did not start with legal theories about federalism or colonialism. 

He walked to Dandi and picked up a handful of salt. Plain, cheap kitchen salt. 

The colonial state taxed it, and by picking it up, Gandhi proved that what sits on your dinner plate is a political outcome. 

Khadi worked on the exact same principle. 

The British Empire made millions by buying cheap Indian cotton, shipping it to factories in England, and selling expensive cloth back to us. So when Gandhi asked Indians to spin their own yarn, it was a direct economic strike. 

When our Constitution was framed in 1950, our founders like BR Ambedkar made an extraordinarily radical gamble. 

Democracies like the United States and the United Kingdom took centuries to give everyone a vote. They started with wealthy male landowners, slowly expanding to working-class men, and keeping women waiting until the 20th century.

India did not wait. The Constitution handed equal voting rights to every single adult citizen from day one.

That was an uncompromising declaration: it did not matter if you were a billionaire, a landless farmer, or someone who could not read a word. In the eyes of the republic, your vote carried the exact same weight. You were a political actor.

Walking away from that power today just because political debates feel noisy or annoying isn't a mature choice. It is tossing away the very weapon generations of Indians fought and died to put in your hands.

So why do we try so hard to run away from the word- Political. Because we confuse politics with party politics.

Party politics is about elections, flags, campaign slogans, and candidate lists. 

Real politics is simply how power and resources get distributed in a society. Every single moment of your day is shaped by a decision someone in power made.

When you hit a massive pothole or sit trapped in traffic after an hour of rain, that is not bad luck. That is municipal corruption and bad urban planning. 

When an exam paper leaks and students lose years of hard work, that is an institutional failure. 

When your petrol price goes up, it is a policy choice. 

Even the air you breathe is political. You can ignore politics all you want, but your lungs are taking in policy decisions with every breath.

We see this same delusion even among artists and celebrities. 

Writers, actors, and artists love saying, "I am just an artist, I stay away from politics." But as lyricist Javed Akhtar once pointed out, claiming to be apolitical just means you accept the status quo. 

When cultural icons stay quiet during a crisis, they are not rising above the noise. They are giving a nod of approval to whoever holds power.

Look at urban voter turnout. Cities like Bengaluru or Mumbai routinely record lower voting percentages than rural districts. Urban professionals skip voting, rely on private infrastructure, and pretend the state does not matter. 

Then, when the city floods or a flyover collapses, everyone acts shocked. Checking out from governance does not protect you from its failures. It guarantees them.

That brings us to the second myth people love to repeat: "Why are you politicizing this?"

Whenever a train derails, a bridge falls, or a public system collapses, politicians in power and their media friends  go with the same script: "This is a tragedy. Please do not politicize it."

Let’s turn the question around. Why should a party in opposition not question? 

What is the actual job of an Opposition party? 

They are not there to applaud when things go well and stay silent when things fail. They are an auditing body paid by taxpayers to hold the government accountable.

Pointing out a flaw is their entire damn job. Like an auditor in a company or a supervisor in a factory.

So when a government or your favorite TV anchor tells you not to politicize something, they are asking you to stop asking questions.

History proves this. 

Economist Amartya Sen famously noted that democratic countries with a free press and active opposition do not suffer from major famines. 

Why? Because public suffering gets politicized. It becomes a threat to the government's survival, which forces them to act and move food. 

Imagine you alone. You have almost no leverage against a massive bureaucracy. 

But politics is the tool that allows you or anyone to turn private pain into public pressure. 

Without politicizing an issue, a broken road is just something you suffer through quietly. Once it gets politicized, it becomes a threat to an elected official's job. That is when the road gets fixed.

So a student sharing information about climate change or a content  creator exposing city corruption, are all engaging in deeply political acts.

Those who stay detached saying ‘politics is not my cup of tea’ must remember that staying detached only works until the system hits you directly. 

No cushion of privilege will last forever.   

You do not need to join a party or yell on television debates to be a political person. 

You just need to understand cause and effect. It means recognizing that your daily life is tied to decisions made by people in power, and refusing to let those decisions happen in the dark.

You can ignore politics all you want, but politics will never ignore you.

Like LME? Support the show: https://rzp.io/rzp/support-lme

Like our journalism? Become a subscriber: https://www.thenewsminute.com/subscription

Produced by Megha Mukundan, script by Pooja Prasanna, camera by Ajay R, edit by Nikhil Sekhar ET, Jaseem Ali