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India has long been a puzzle for students of comparative democratic politics. Its success in maintaining democratic rule since independence in 1947 (excluding the brief authoritarian interlude of the 1975-77 Emergency) in the world's largest and most heterogeneous democracy runs counter to John Stuart Mill's (1958, 230) proposition that democracy is "next to impossible" in multiethnic societies and completely impossible in linguistically divided countries.(1) And it confounds Selig S. Harrison's prediction (1960, 338), in line with Mill's argument, of India's democratic failure and/or territorial disintegration: "The odds are almost wholly against the survival of freedom and ... the issue is, in fact, whether any Indian state can survive at all." The Indian puzzle is even more troublesome for consociational (power-sharing) theory. In contrast with Mill's and Harrison's thinking, power-sharing theory holds that democracy is possible in deeply divided societies but only if their type of democracy is consociational, that is, characterized by (1) grand coalition governments that include representatives of all major linguistic and religious groups, (2) cultural autonomy for these groups, (3) proportionality in political representation and civil service appointments, and (4) a minority veto with regard to vital minority rights and autonomy. In contrast, under majoritarian winner-take-all democracy--characterized by the concentration of power in bare-majority one-party governments, centralized power, a disproportional electoral system, and absolute majority rule--consociational theory regards stable democracy in deeply divided societies as highly unlikely. In other words, consociational theory maintains that power sharing is a necessary (although not a sufficient) condition for democracy in deeply divided countries.
Consociational theory has had a strong influence on comparative politics, and it has spawned a vast literature. Soon after it was formulated, Daalder (1974, 609) spoke of "an incipient school" of consociationalism, and, a few years later, Powell (1979, 295) proclaimed the theory "among the most influential contributions to comparative politics." It has become a widely accepted paradigm for the analysis of democracies that can be regarded as the prototypes of power sharing, such as the Netherlands (Daalder and Irwin 1989; Mair 1994), Belgium (Huyse 1987; Zolberg 1977), Austria (Powell 1970; Luther and Muller 1992), Switzerland (Lehmbruch 1993; Linder 1994; Steiner 1990), Lebanon (Dekmejian 1978; Messarra 1994), Malaysia (Von Vorys 1975; Zakaria 1989), and Colombia (Dix 1980; Hartlyn 1988). And it has...