Dr. Kuruvilla Pandikattu SJ
We just celebrated Valentine’s Day! During this celebration, we tend to reduce love to spectacle—roses, proposals, declarations. Yet, as a recent reflection in Outlook India insists, love is not a decorative emotion but a political force that shapes belonging, exclusion, solidarity, and power (Outlook News Desk, 2026). If fear can be mobilised into majoritarianism and resentment can harden into ideology, then love too can be mobilised—either as a boundary or as a bridge. The question before us is stark: in an age of political and religious polarisation, what kind of love will animate our politics and social life?
To answer this, we must step beyond the narrow English word “love.” In Tamil alone, there are more than fifty expressions that gesture toward its shades—anbu (affectionate love), paasam (familial attachment), kadhal (romantic love), nesam (tender fondness), uravu (relational bond), karuṇai (compassion). A language that proliferates words for love recognises that it is not singular but textured, embodied in kinship, friendship, devotion, eros, sacrifice, and solidarity. When politics flattens people into vote banks or adversaries, such linguistic richness reminds us that human attachment cannot be reduced to slogans.
Ancient Indian thought elevates this multiplicity into ethics. The ideal of vasudhaiva kutumbakam—the world as one family—envisions an order where the stranger is not threat but kin. The principle of karuṇā demands active compassion toward all beings, not merely sentimental empathy (Rajendran, 2010). In a country as internally diverse as India—across caste, colour, creed, language—these ideas are not ornamental philosophy; they are political necessity. To love as Indians means to refuse hierarchies that dehumanise, to dismantle the quiet normalisation of discrimination, and to imagine solidarity across difference.
But India is not alone in wrestling with the public meaning of love. In the Western canon, Plato offered profound meditations on love in the Symposium and the Phaedrus. For Plato, eros begins as desire for beauty in a person but ascends toward love of truth and the Good itself. Love, in this ascent, becomes transformative: it pulls the soul upward from appetite to virtue. Indian philosophical traditions similarly trace gradations—from kāma (desire) to prema (selfless love) to bhakti (devotional surrender). Across cultures, then, love is not static emotion but disciplined expansion of the self beyond its own cravings.
Christian theology radicalises this expansion. In First Epistle to the Corinthians, Chapter 13, the Apostle Paul writes that love is patient and kind, not envious or proud; it bears, believes, hopes, and endures all things (Mashburn, 2024). Here, love (agape) is not attraction but steadfast commitment to the flourishing of the other. It is the greatest virtue because it survives the collapse of certainty and the erosion of power. Where politics rewards domination, Paul imagines endurance; where public discourse thrives on humiliation, he prescribes humility.
The convergence is striking. Plato’s ascent toward the Good, India’s cosmic kinship, and Paul’s enduring agape each resist the fragmentation of society into mutually hostile camps. They do not treat love as utopian fantasy but as a rigorous discipline. Love is not blindness to injustice; it is the courage to confront injustice without surrendering to hatred.
Today, India stands at multiple crossroads—economic aspiration alongside social fracture, technological advancement alongside communal suspicion. Around the world, democracies tremble under waves of populism and distrust. In such a climate, love may seem naïve, even dangerous. Yet the alternative—normalised contempt—is far more perilous. If politics is powered by emotion, then only a politics animated by expansive love can interrupt cycles of vengeance (Outlook News Desk, 2026).
To love each other as Indians—across caste lines, across shades of skin, across religions—is not sentimental rhetoric. It is constitutional realism. The promise of equality cannot survive without social affection; law alone cannot manufacture fraternity. Likewise, to love as world citizens in the spirit of vasudhaiva kutumbakam is not to erase national identity but to situate it within shared planetary vulnerability. Climate crises, pandemics, wars—these do not respect borders. Only cooperative solidarity does.
Love, then, is not an ideal postponed to poetry. It is the only viable path out of the chaos we inhabit. Not because it eliminates conflict, but because it transforms how conflict is held. A society shaped by karuṇā will still debate fiercely, but it will not dehumanise. Politics guided by agape will still pursue justice, but it will refuse to annihilate the opponent. A citizen inspired by Plato’s ascent will seek truth beyond partisan gain.
On this Valentine’s season, we would do well to resist reducing love to private celebration. Love is social architecture. It is the grammar of coexistence. It is the discipline that enlarges the self until it can hold the neighbour, the rival, even the stranger.
In a time when chaos tempts us toward cynicism, love is not escape. It is strategy. It is survival. It is the last politics worthy of our humanity.
(The views expressed are solely those of the author.)
