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Everywhere man stands and lives for certain goals and values. He needs to defend these values, human rights and the well being of his near and dear ones under a suitable form of governance. Every nation, religion, community, political party, or group claims to uphold them, but often fails to carry out its proclaimed mission. In Political Science, it can be called as lack of ‘political engineering’ approach.’
Engineering is the application of scientific and technical knowledge to solve human problems. Engineers use imagination, judgment and reasoning to apply science, technology, mathematics, and practical experience. The result is the design, production, and operation of useful objects or processes. Its dictionary meaning for us is to lay out, construct, or manage as an engineer. It is to contrive or plan out usually with more or less subtle skill and craft.
However, it is not a call to ‘technocracy’, which is a trend that came into being in the USA on the strength of the ideas of the economist T. Veblen. It gained popularity in the 1930s. Technocratic societies had sprung up in a number of countries. Adherents of technocracy claim that anarchy and instability of contemporarily capitalist society are the result of the administration of state affairs by politicians. They hold that the ills of capitalist society may be cured provided that economic life and state administration are taken over by technical experts and businessmen.
They want direct subordination of the state machinery to the industrial managers. The contemporary scientific and technological revolutions have revived some ideas of technocracy with theories of ‘industrial’, ‘post-industrial’, and ‘technotronic’ societies. There is rise of ‘managerism’, a doctrine of the leading role of managers or ‘managerial revolution’ (J. Burnham).
In the 1970s, came the notion of meritocracy which pretended to replace bureaucracy and technocracy for a ‘society of knowledge’. Political engineering stands differently from them. It comes forward as a defence-mechanism of liberal democracy. It declines to support authoritarian rules. Its basic philosophy, values and goals originate from the tenets of liberal democracy.
Liberal Democracy:
Liberal democracy operates normally in peacetime but requires knowledge and practice of political technologies to run it effectively and efficiently, particularly, amid crises and challenges from non-liberal ideologies, movements and organisations.”
In a liberal democracy, there is combination of free-market economy with which universal adult franchise came up. Conflicting claims of the capitalists and the masses are accommodated under the ideology of ‘welfare state’. Procedures and institutional arrangements stand by its new principles.
Principles of liberal democracy include:
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(a) Government by consent,
(b) Public accountability,
(c) Majority rule,
(d) Recognition of minority rights, and,
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(e) Constitutional government.
Its mechanism includes democratic institutions and procedures. Accordingly, there should be more than one political party freely competing for political power. Political offices should not be confined to any privileged class. Periodic elections based on universal adult franchise should be held regularly. Civil liberties should be protected and granted to all citizens. Independence of judiciary is a must to maintain them.
Objectives:
Therefore, the objectives of ‘political engineering’ would be:
(a) To formulate, develop and operationalise the concept of ‘political technology’ suitable to meet the needs and demands of the democratic systems;
(b) To identify political technologies out of experiences gathered by the political leaders during the last five decades of democracy;
(c) To process and update these identified political technologies (IPTs) for use to strengthen, defend and protect the democratic system;
(d) To relate particular political technologies to some specific problems areas so as to empower democratic politicians to be more effective for delivering goods to the people; and
(e) To make these ‘political technologies’ available to the people.
For this purpose, some areas mentioned below can be earmarked to identify and process political technologies for use by the political leaders of the Third World countries, and also in some advanced countries:
1. Areas of social justice and democratic participation.
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2. Clash between the nation-state and globalisation.
3. Internal subversion coming from fundamentalism and violent societies.
4. Restraining a permanent minorities to trample over the legitimate rights of another permanent minority or majority and vice versa.
5. Protection of natural, democratic, and fundamental rights of an individual qua other individuals and groups or against one’s own group, party, religious dispensation, communal teachings, and claims of culture and tradition.
Its long-term perspective would be to envisage the formation of political technologies for democratic governance irrespective of specific culture, ideology, country, religion and language and others. This can be only a distant theoretical goal. The urgent need of the hour is to serve the cause of the weak, still-young, fragile, endangered democracies of the developing countries.