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The quest for a democratic polity

Democracy, perhaps, is the most frequently uttered political word that our people, and the policy planners, have pronounced since, and prior to, our national independence in 1971. But our history has hardly witnessed the exercise of democratic norms and values in our day-to-day social and political life. The result is obvious: The definition of democracy has been reduced to, in the popular perception, mere transfer of power through moderately acceptable elections.
   New Age, on the other hand, is fully convinced that mere rhetorical utterance of the word ‘democracy’ even a million times a day will not deliver democracy. To really have it, we need our political parties to become democratic, in the first place, though they cannot be democratic until and unless the members of the parties have the scope to elect their leadership democratically, the elected leaderships make political and organisational decisions democratically, maintain transparent financial accounts of the organisations, give the tested members of the parties political assignments at different levels of the organisations, etc. Besides, we need a parliament consisting of persons genuinely committed to the democratic causes of the electorate, an Election Commission that is truly independent of the executive branch of the state, a judiciary separated from the executive and committed to a democratic justice delivery system, and a government really accountable to the people, etc. These are difficult tasks for any nation, but unfortunately there is no short-cut to the destination called democracy.
   Hence, the first section of our four-part anniversary supplement, styled ‘The quest for a democratic polity’, focuses on the political issues in question, by way of briefly critiquing the existing situations and making humble efforts to underline democratic imperatives.
   — Editor

Social justice and the market economy

That persistent economic development and sustained growth of democracy are inter-related, or dependent on each other, is a truism for any country — particularly a least developed country like Bangladesh. True that Bangladesh needs ‘foreign capital’ for local economic growth, but it is equally true that the neo-liberal development paradigms that prescribe unconditional flow of foreign investment and wholesale liberalisation of markets for foreign goods for the ‘development’ of the ‘underdeveloped’ have already proved counter-productive in many countries across the continents.
   New Age is aware of the fact that the stronger economies of the day, who champion the free reign of corporate capital and commodities in the LDC markets, have always been protective about their own markets, particularly during the formative stage of their national economies. Besides, they have never ignored the importance of the political role of the state in regulating the economy in their national interest. But the Bangladeshi protagonists of the so-called market economy preach that the state cannot intervene in the market even when the people at large are being crushed under an anarchic market system.
   The second section of our four-part anniversary supplement, styled ‘Social justice and the market economy’, focuses especially on the democratic necessity of political intervention of the state, as and when necessary, to regulate the inherently unruly nature of capital and markets, without which social justice would continue to remain elusive.
   — Editor

Gendered democracy,
endangered democracy

Democracy, to New Age, is a political order that envisages the equality of men and women in all the spheres of human activities — social, economic and cultural. The ‘democracy’ that fails to pave the way for the women to enter, equally with men, the fields of applied politics, governance and economy needs, in our view, to be overhauled radically to genuinely base it on the principles of equal rights of the male and the female citizens.
   We identify the patriarchal mindset of the country’s ruling elite, spread over across the political divide, to be the main impediment to the democratic emancipation of women, and assert that without paving the way for democratic freedom of the women, fifty per cent of the total population, Bangladesh will not be able to make any significant progress — politically or economically.
   The third section of our four-part anniversary supplement — styled ‘Gendered democracy, endangered democracy’ — therefore focuses on the need of political and ideological interventions in the ruling discourses of democracy, which have so far failed to bring the female citizens into the mainstream of our political and economic life, to say the least. The supplement has also made attempts to show how, and why, repression, deprivation, violence, etc are the integral components of women’s life in the gendered socio-political and economic order that rules Bangladesh.
   — Editor

Education, knowledge and politics

Education is not a value-free, innocent idea without distinct political objectives infused into it by the rulers. The ruling classes, irrespective of their philosophical orientation, consciously use educational institutions as an ideological apparatus to produce and reproduce consent in favour of the established political and economic order.
   Since democracy is a way of life, it can therefore only be realised, flourished, and sustained in a society by way of introducing, and sustaining, an education system that produces and reproduces core democratic values, such as respect for human dignity, equality of man and woman, social justice, equitable distribution of national resources among citizens, citizens’ right to question the established order, and respect for dissenting views.
   For an education system to be democratic, it has to be able to produce thinking citizens, male and female, intellectually capable of rejecting obscurantist, and therefore regressive, thoughts and ideas that hold the society and the state back from progress. Bangladesh, striving for democratic growth for decades now, therefore needs a democratic education system, without which, New Age strongly believes, the dream for a democratic society and state will continue to remain elusive.
   The concluding section of our four-part anniversary supplement, styled ‘Education, knowledge and politics’, focuses on the nature of education the state presently imparts, its targets, required democratic reforms in the education sector, and on top of all, the need for political intervention in reshaping the system for democratic growth of the society.
   — Editor