Values system and receiving communities
- Hueiyen Lanpao Editorial :: September 03 2015 -
Southeast Asia provides fertile ground for examining or rather experiencing the worth of a value system spurred by the idea of modern parliamentary democracy.
The advent of British rule primarily in the Indian Sub-Continent had pushed certain parliamentary institutions and made the communities literal receivers of certain practices stirred by the principles of emancipation.
Consequent to the trend set in India, the three organs of the State – the legislature, the executive and the judiciary, were made to perform roles expected to produce post enlightenment values.
In its attempt to quickly adapt to the new democratic values, polices and institutions were thrust upon the people.
The States expected the citizens to overcome the gruelling exercise of testing democratic values not necessarily rooted in the soil.
The value attached to the organs of the State or for that matter any institution, at times overemphasised the necessity of forcing upon values rather making the citizens internalise the finer points of democracy.
Thus, the raison d’ętre of playing a role as the means to an end became contextually twisted.
This is why, citizens are made to see the means as an end and there are no efforts to correct the lopsided vision while aberrations of the worst kind are being churned out in everyday life.
This has led to further distortion of the procedural approach and as a result, one can easily bypass norms of governance by adopting practices considered anathema to all types of visions.
Here, one should be reminded that desiring a radical change will have less impact if the practices of normalizing aberrations continue to afflict society in transition.
Even as the end of colonialism approached, most post colonial States in Southeast Asia have been afflicted with a peculiar traumatic experience of normalizing aberrations.
When one closely scrutinizes the contours of recent history, there are adequate evidences to suggest that the ruling class in the post colonial period had been made to learn the intricacies of governing the ungovernable through acquired values rather than inculcated practices.
While making efforts to fulfil certain visions necessitated by choosing the correct path to development, envisioned objectives are rarely achieved despite the adoption of ideal techniques of implementing policy related programmes.
In the process of executing the set agenda of the States, societies caught in socio-economic transition often face the dilemma mistaking the means as the end. In effect this has rendered most modern institutions impotent.
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