Centrism: The Democracy-Killer

“I don’t really think about politics, I’m just trying to do what’s best for the country,” is something many educated, urban Indians feel inclined to say. While that statement is as defensible as any other position from an ideological standpoint, examining its practical implications reveals that centrism in its various common forms is not completely unbiased, and instead tends to favor existing power structures over alternative ones
While it’s not the only one, NOTA, the Supreme Court mandated ‘None Of The Above’ option available during elections, and its effects are demonstrably far reaching. When NOTA is chosen, it’s almost always by a voter who either evaluated all the candidates and chose the least desirable option, or quickly dismissed the voting screen as an unpleasant chore
Either way, NOTA votes are the result of a deliberate decision to let some other agent decide your preferred outcome, rather than making one yourself. This was demonstrated by the fact that votes for NOTA outnumbered the winning candidate’s votes in several parliamentary constituacies in the 2019 general elections. The relative increase in NOTA votes also demonstrates an increased level of dissatisfaction with the available political options at large
The logical conclusion of centrism is the “sab neta same hain” position, which claims that all politicians are inherently corrupt, and therefore there is no difference between them. Similar to NOTA, it is an inherently dishonest position, which hides behind a pretense of analytical detachment by pretending a relative comparison between two inherently bad options is an absolute one. During the 2020–2021 farmer’s protests, centrism manifested as an insistence that the protests against the farm laws are an unrelated affair, which only affect the farmers’ livelihoods, and are entirely the fault of the protesting farmers themselves, due to their failure to understand what they were doing. In practice, it meant people in urban areas, particularly in BJP strongholds, refusing accept that the farmer’s protests were even a thing, until all three laws were repealed, due to the sheer persistence of the farmers. It also meant that the protests, and by extension their impact on the country, had far less political cost to the ruling party than would have otherwise been the case
Media outlets which purport to maintain some sort of conceptual balance by giving equal airtime and coverage to diametrically opposed positions, often end up doing the same thing, particularly in outlets using the Indian English language, both due to its natural proclivity towards verbosity, and the fact that the majority of English newspapers in India are run by the same handful of people. By framing everything as ‘one side says X while the other says Y’, both sides become effectively indistinguishable from each other, unless one already knows what to think. This manifests most prominently in ‘both sides have sources’, where coverage of communal violence is designed to be as ambiguous as possible, as neither side is allowed to be definitively at fault or in the right, lest accusations of ‘bias’ be hurled at the outlet. Coverage of other political issues tends to be similar, although to a lesser extent, with ‘either side could have done it’
Corporate and celebrity centrism is in many ways an extension of media centrism, and often displays similar traits while presenting itself as a desire to remain ‘above the fray’. Following the CAA-NRC protests in 2019 and again the Delhi riots in 2020, many celebrities and businesses which previously had no public statement on the matter, suddenly did, in order to avoid being accused of having one. By refusing to state an opinion on either matter, they effectively decided that the status quo should remain, as an increase it would have required either a direct endorsement of the violence, or an implicit agreement with the government’s actions. This decision, like all others, had effects beyond themselves, primarily by making the protests and riots easier on the government by diminishing their perceived impact. Similar dynamics can be seen when corporations which are otherwise silent on politics, continue operating following riots in an area they have branches in, while also donating to relief efforts, in effect deciding that their actions should carry no political weight, instead of acknowledging the context they exist in.
None of this is to say that centrism is always a negative or dishonest position, or that it should be discarded in favour of extreme views on either side of an issue. Positions which require research and deliberation to reach, are demonstrably better than those which are reached without, and those who research political issues and cannot bring themselves to endorse any particular party, are in no position to criticize those who do not research anything at all, and instead choose NOTA or another neutral option. However, this does not change the fact that centrism tends to favor the status quo, and that actions taken in good faith from a position of neutrality can have far worse consequences for society than similar actions from an ideological viewpoint
A common counterargument is that the ability to make a choice between options which are objectively worse, is itself a price worth paying for democracy, and that NOTA is a valid option for people who are genuinely unable to choose between the candidates, and that other forms of neutrality are similarly legitimate tools to express doubt and dissatisfaction. Additionally, a claim can be made that centrism is not a position of power in itself, and simply reflects a larger failure of the system, which allows too many people to make decisions without considering their impact on others
Those are fair points which should be taken into account, but are ultimately incomplete. Centrism does not exist in a vacuum, and always favors the status quo, because the status quo always exists, and there are only two ways to change it: to decide that it should not exist, and to replace it with something else. In short, a choice must be made, but one is only in a position to make it, if one has first made the decision to make it. That is why your democracy, and by extension your country, aren’t defined by the choices you didn’t make, as a neutral observer, but rather the ones you did, and did not, make for yourself.