Between Pragmatism and Pusillanimity
When institutions fail to act in accordance with their mandate, it is not prudence - it is cowardice
The executive increasingly operates through personalized and, at times, vindictive use of power. In response, individuals and institutions are constantly calibrating: when to speak, when to act, when to hold back. This constant self-editing, combined with the growing insistence that everyone must “resist” or “speak up,” has deepened polarization and muddied the intellectual landscape. The mutual denunciation - of disagreement as professionalised dissent and of silence as cowardice - has made collaboration difficult and common ground elusive.
In such a climate, it is important to step back and ask: what are the principles by which we distinguish pragmatism from pusillanimity?.
The answer shapes whether we preserve the civic institutions that democracy requires, or watch them hollow out from within.
The Abdication of Leadership
Today, too many wield power without exercising leadership. This failure has corroded institutional integrity and professional standards. The problem is acute among those whose roles require them to uphold public values - journalists, judges, philanthropists, think tank leaders, university heads, civil servants, and political leaders. These roles are not neutral; they are custodial. Their legitimacy rests on upholding civic norms, even at personal cost. Yet too many have abdicated that responsibility without even being tested.
"Pragmatism" has become a convenient shield - invoked to mask fear and justify capitulation. The possibility of executive retaliation is real, but that is precisely why this moment calls for leadership. Instead, many institutions and individuals have surrendered far in advance of any actual threat, often based on exaggerated risks rather than lived pressure.
Think tanks now vet research proposals and scrub out political analysis - even though governance is inseparable from political context. Philanthropy has doubled down on service delivery and soft issues while avoiding anything that might challenge power. This is not neutrality; it is strategic evasion designed to remain inoffensive to power.
To be clear, this is not an argument for institutional activism - that kind of confrontation can trigger its own cascading consequences. Institutions should avoid partisanship. But nonpartisan does not mean passive. Civic institutions must find ways to uphold norms without aligning with factions. However, to shrink their mandate and abandon their purpose is not strategy - it is abdication. Leadership requires conviction: a point of view, and the courage to stand by it. When individuals or institutions forfeit this for convenience or safety, they cease to lead and become instruments of power.
The consequences are visible: too many intellectuals have become courtiers, media outlets often reduce reportage to stenography, philanthropies are entrenching power equations rather than challenging them, and think tanks increasingly blur the line with lobbying. The desire to retain access has come at the cost of legitimacy. The broader principle is clear: when institutions fail to act in accordance with their mandate, it is not prudence - it is cowardice
The Citizen's Dilemma
But outside direct institutional roles, the question becomes harder: what does the present moment demand of citizens and civic leaders?
Many see this time as an existential crisis for liberal democracy, and calls to "resist" or "speak up" have grown louder. Yet this moment is also defined by an over-reliance on speech and protest, unmoored from the structural work of civic culture. With institutions hollowed out and community organizations frayed, many people believe that "speaking up" on social media is the frontline of democracy. This creates a false sense of agency.
Speaking up has value - particularly when it pierces the illusion of consensus - but without follow-through or organizing, it becomes performative. We are increasingly mistaking symbols for substance and demanding that others do the same.
Today, there is no real third space - no civic-political space that is political but not oppositional, principled but not partisan. All action is read as either for or against the regime. This reflects a deeper collapse of political imagination. Every act of disagreement gets coded as "resistance" and becomes a partisan label. Many hesitate to engage out of a genuine desire to preserve political agency. But this reluctance to engage cannot be used to give ourselves a free pass, enjoying freedoms that required lakhs to give their lives just 75 years ago while bearing none of the onus to safeguard them.
Liberal democracy requires a triumvirate of state, opposition, and civil society. However, this mutually reinforcing dialectic of regime and "resistance" is eroding the third leg. Every politically conscious actor is now seen as either instrumental to power or opposed to it. There is no legitimate space left to intervene without being boxed into one category or the other.
Rebuilding the Civic Middle
In India, many civic actors have now chosen disengagement to avoid entanglement. The result is a hollowing out of civic structures that once mediated between people and power. This is not just a democratic loss; it is also a cultural loss. In reducing everything to binaries, we have killed the possibilities in between, the space where imagination and creativity thrive and give nations their vitality.
What we need urgently is not just more protests and voices "speaking up" but a concerted effort to reconstruct that civic middle. This is not an oppositional space but a collaborative one, where values can be clarified and norms upheld. Institutional actors such as philanthropists, intellectuals, think tanks, university heads, business leaders - those who claim to act out of prudence or neutrality - must take responsibility for rebuilding it. That means supporting long-term civic work that moves beyond service delivery to reshape how power is held and contested.
Rebuilding this space is not just a moral imperative; it is a structural necessity. In India, where the civic sphere is increasingly bureaucratized, rebuilding means reclaiming autonomy and reviving institutions that can mediate power rather than echo it. Without a renewed civic middle, we will remain trapped between authoritarian drift and reactive resistance.
If this work demands risk - so be it. Running away from that risk is not prudence. It is pusillanimity.
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A small note: I’ve been considering moving more of my writing to this blog. While newspaper op-eds offer wide reach, they also come with constraints - the need for a news peg, word limits, and delays between writing and publication. Writing here allows greater flexibility in form, timing, and tone.
If you’ve found any of these pieces valuable, I’d appreciate your sharing them with others who might find them worthwhile as well.
Also Read:
Institutional Independence Is About Distribution of Power Not Individual Virtue
Published in the Indian Express
A very nice, thoughtful piece, bang on about some aspects of our current malaise. I appreciate the attempt to provide non-partisan analyses and recommendations. But I wonder whether the aim of trying to be fair-minded risks distorting reality when that reality is profoundly asymmetric, as it is today (imo).
Publicly rejecting certain foundational aspects of the ideology or actions of the parties currently in power has clear costs for many people, and doing so may come across as a kind of shrill activism, with a partisan slant.But I'm sceptical that one can find a genuine civic middle which doesn't in fact involve such a rejection.
To put the point another way: the search for a mid-point between two partisan positions may seem to be the correct way in which to take a non-partisan view of a situation. But when one side takes extreme positions, looking for this mid-point may lead us away from neutrality.
I appreciate the efforts of people like you, Yogendra Yadav, maybe Pratap Bhanu Mehta in some modes to present arguments which should appeal to people with different first-order political preferences (I try to do so too, in my teaching). I wonder, though, whether this is a stable orientation in our current situation.