In every open, democratic society, there will always be "useful idiots" -centrists, liberals, and moderates, especially in India, who despite being the majority, fail to take a morally clear stand on issues like terrorism and extremism. They’re not evil, just intellectually hijacked and morally cowardly, obsessed with sounding balanced rather than confronting reality. Their three main failings are: false equivalence (treating mild Hindu reactionism as equal to Islamist terrorism), lack of situational clarity (bringing irrelevant comparisons in critical moments), and failure to gauge severity (treating all offenses as equally condemnable). These behaviors come from insecurity and a need for elite validation, not principles. They fetishize process over outcomes, neutrality over truth, and legality over justice even when these ideas enable decay.
What needs to be understood is this: it’s not worth trying to reform or argue with them. It’s futile. No country has ever managed to fix this mindset because it’s a statistical constant-
there will always be a X percentage of such people. The only way forward is to disown them, ignore them, and not let them steer the national narrative. Unless you’re China, where total authoritarianism silences everyone, the best approach in a democracy is to stop feeding them legitimacy and move past their performative delusions.