Those advocating democracy, taking the literal meaning of "demos" -- the people -- as constituting majoritarian rule, often forget that the will of the majority may not necessarily lead to the most distilled judgment for the good of the society as a whole, because of the ignorance of the electorate of the appropriateness and/or timeliness of the decisions being taken on their behalf.

Additionally, the people's representatives themselves may not be au currant with the multitude of issues they are required to take decisions on. Congruent to this school of thought is the animosity expressed by legislators towards their opponents on the other side of the aisle, regardless of the value of the arguments proffered by the opposition.

The discussion such as the above may give the impression that one is advocating a form of "aristocracy of the intellect" to run the government. A warning against this form of governance has been sounded from the time of Plato, who found real difference between democracy and oligarchy in terms of the wealth possessed by the people. Wherever people rule by virtue of the reason of wealth it was oligarchy, Plato wrote, and wherever the poor rule it was democracy.

Taken separately, this vein of thought is similar to socialist thinking that pervaded Europe from the age of the Renaissance, or the emergence of modernism, delineated as the time when tradition gave way to reason and, in Marxian terminology, the secularisation and humanisation of the world.

As the descriptive features of modernity include the emergence of complex money economy and, thereby, the continuation of vertical and hierarchical social systems (the analogy of the television series Upstairs and Downstairs can be cited), the question that had to be answered was how best to safeguard the rights of the vast majority of the people who according to Scottish philosophers Robert Owen were doomed to live in poverty so that a small minority of the people could live in the splendour that they were used to.

The quest for democracy as an answer to this question continued, and the French and the Bolshevik Revolutions created milestones in the history of mankind. It would be imprudent to forget the Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights, and the American Declaration of Independence, all of which were attempts to establish the rights of the common people in the then existing feudal environment.

If the end of the first World War saw the first wave of democracy, and decolonisation the second, Samuel Huntington saw the third wave following the collapse of communism. Whether the fourth wave would be ushered in the Middle East, particularly in the Muslim world, as desired by the Bush administration remains to be seen. But then, it is debatable whether the seed of democratisation is to be given more value than its quality.

Insertion of deliberative democracy in the governance of a country may not be accompanied by more productive input in the decision making process. Here again the skepticism expressed by Alexis de Tocqueville after his visit to the United States, and that of Edmund Burke of the French Revolution, about the pre-eminence of quantity over quality, and the cruelty that a majority can inflict on the minority, become relevant.

Very recently, the advisor for finance was reported to have compared the pre-budget debates held in our Parliament with the pre-budget consultations held with various stake holders, and concluded that the 2007-08 budget was far more responsive to popular demands than the ones held in our Parliaments.

Since the legitimacy of the current budget is beyond challenge, one cannot but wonder about the need for an elected government before the corrupt and the abusers of power have been rooted out of the political arena, after which the country can begin its journey anew towards truly fulfilling the aspirations of the people.

Professor Benjamin Barber of the University of Maryland (The Conquest of Politics) wrote about the conflict between the progressive liberals' emphasis on civil rights of minorities and the neo-conservatives' stress on economic rights of individuals and corporations, while Professor Michael Walzer (Harvard University) is least bothered that the claim to rule should rest upon the knowledge of the people, because the people are "subjects of the law, and if law is to bind them as free men and women, they must also be its makers."

One hopes that the Walzerian concept of the supremacy of the people has taken into consideration that the assertion of peoples' supremacy rests upon certain institutions that have to be created and nurtured for sustainable democracy. The history (pre-January 11 declaration of emergency) of Bangladesh chronicles mostly the destruction of the institutions, and the institution of corruption, nepotism and other aberrations distorting the governance of the country, which could be best described as a "House of Horror."

It is indeed amazing that Bangladeshis, amidst the obstructions put in the path of progress, have shown considerable resilience in achieving promising macro-economic indicators, good export performance, increased remittance, lesser infant mortality and death at child birth, slightly better education (though not good enough to compete with even neighbouring countries), increased consciousness about socio-political rights, vibrant civil society, and, no less importantly, a force ready to rescue the country from an abyss without trying to lay claim to direct governance of the country.

One hopes that good sense will dawn upon our political leaders in order to correct the mistakes committed in the past and lead the country to the path of prosperity. Words alone will not suffice. They have to produce quantifiable results so that words do not get lost in translation.

Kazi Anwarul Masud is a former Secretary and Ambassador.