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After about 100 years of operating constitutional democracies, the rulers and the ruled regularly find themselves standing on the crossroads. Leaders, often times, lack the will and strategy to face critical situations. But the people have to pay a very heavy price for their leaders’ ignorance and follies. There exists a powerful consensus that liberal democracy launched in a country as a whole and its units must somehow be defended, protected and made vibrant so as to enable it to tide over internal and external challenges.’
One of the major causes of the increasing number of problems and difficulties of the developing political systems has been the lack of learning and transmitting the experiences of the outgoing political rulers by the incoming political rulers. At this level, both sets of them with people as mute spectators remain segregated, isolated, and even hostile to each other.
Each set of rulers or political leaders in government is conducting the affairs of the country in a trial and error fashion. At the end of their term or even early, the rulers happen to add more and more problems like increasing poverty, unemployment, insecurity, and discontentment among the people etc.
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Again the new hands also go on conducting the governance in the same hit-and-run manner. There is no way of learning from the experiences of outgoing rulers. The experience they gained goes with them. Some of these rulers even fail to introspect within and learn from their own experiences.
Often problems remain where they were. Problems require solutions borne out of their own experience, which is hardly gained and applied, and transferred to the successors of the contemporary members of fragile democracies. Exploiting their failures and incapacities, usually the army commanders or civilian dictators take over.
As this experience has hardly been analysed and conceptualised in some institutionalised form, stored and effectively learnt by political leaders, the people continue to grope in dark. Barring a few, most of the political leaders and the people do not know why, when, how and what particular action was taken up by the policy-makers, and why it did not come out in an anticipated manner.
The total neglect and waste of this experience keeps both the rulers and the ruled ignorant of the realities of each other’s activities. The gap existing between the ideals of the Constitution and the realities prevailing in the country remains as ever. Some of these polities continues to have western model of governance without devising appropriate mechanism and tools to apply them it in a proper manner. A country survives as a democracy but remains weak, soft and insecure.
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Therefore, the multifarious problems cropping up in a weak democratic system demands, firstly, the objective identification of her past experience of democratic governance, secondly, a context-free conceptualisation of that experience in the form of ‘political technologies’, thirdly, the processing and updating them in view of changing needs and requirements of the political system, and lastly, correlating these political technologies with specific problems of the democratic polity. All this has to be done as part of democratic political engineering.