Last year you studied democracy as power shared among the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. No single arm of government can run unchecked.
This chapter carries the same idea forward, but through two real stories instead of a definition. Belgium and Sri Lanka both faced demands for power-sharing among their own social groups — and handled those demands in almost opposite ways. The stories come first. The general lessons, and the forms power-sharing can take, come only after — earned from the stories, not stated ahead of them.
Test an equation before you accept it — the same one this chapter's own opening cartoon poses: sharing power = dividing power = weakening the country. If a government's power gets split up, does the country end up weaker for it?
Hold that question through the two stories ahead. Belgium split its power four different ways among its language communities. It avoided the very civic strife that a divided country risks. Sri Lanka kept its power undivided in the majority community's hands. It drove itself into a civil war that lasted decades.
The equation gets the direction backwards. In these two stories, the country that refused to share power came apart — not the one that shared it.
Both stories in this chapter turn on one word: ethnic. An ethnic group is a social division built on shared culture. Its members believe they share a common descent, through a shared physical type, a shared culture, or both.
They need not share the same religion. They need not share the same nationality either. Keep this definition close — Belgium and Sri Lanka are both countries where more than one ethnic group lives inside one set of borders.
Belgium is a small European country — smaller in area than the state of Haryana. It borders France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Luxembourg. Its population is a little over one crore, roughly half of Haryana's.
Its ethnic mix is genuinely complex. 59 per cent of the population lives in the Flemish region and speaks Dutch. 40 per cent lives in Wallonia and speaks French. The remaining 1 per cent speaks German.
Look at the capital, Brussels, and the national ratio flips: 80 per cent speak French there, only 20 per cent speak Dutch. The country's minority language is the capital's local majority.
The demographic split was not the whole problem. Wealth and opportunity were split unevenly across it too. The minority French-speaking community was relatively rich and powerful.
The Dutch-speaking community received the benefits of economic development and education much later, and resented it. Through the 1950s and 1960s this resentment turned into real tension between the two communities. It was most acute in Brussels — the one place where the Dutch-speaking majority found itself a local minority.
Sri Lanka is an island nation a few kilometres off Tamil Nadu's southern coast. It has about two crore people — about the same as Haryana.
Its population is diverse too: 74 per cent speak Sinhala, 18 per cent speak Tamil. The Tamil-speakers split into two groups — "Sri Lankan Tamils" (13 per cent, the country's own Tamil natives) and "Indian Tamils" (descended from plantation workers brought over from India in the colonial period). Sri Lankan Tamils are concentrated in the north and east of the island.
Religion tracks language only loosely, not exactly. Most Sinhala-speakers are Buddhist. Most Tamils are Hindu or Muslim. About 7 per cent of the population, from both language groups, is Christian.
Set the two demographic pictures side by side, and the same risk appears in both. A numeric majority, in either country, could simply use its size to force its will on everyone else.
In Belgium that meant the Dutch community over the French- and German-speakers, with a messy partition on the table, since both sides had a claim on Brussels. In Sri Lanka it meant the Sinhala community, with a still larger majority, over the entire country. Both countries opened with the same structural risk — what each one did about it is where the two stories start to diverge.
Sri Lanka's story needs one more precise word: majoritarianism. It is the belief that the majority community should be able to run a country however it wants, disregarding the wishes and needs of the minority.
Watch for exactly this belief in what Sri Lanka's government did after independence.
Sri Lanka became independent in 1948. Sinhala community leaders pushed for government dominance simply because they were the majority. The elected government obliged, adopting one majoritarian measure after another to establish Sinhala supremacy.
A 1956 Act made Sinhala the sole official language, disregarding Tamil entirely. Government policy began preferring Sinhala applicants for university seats and government jobs. A new constitution went further still — it stipulated that the state itself shall protect and foster Buddhism.
Measures like these do not arrive as one shock. They arrive one after another, and each one widens the gap a little more.
Across the years, Sri Lankan Tamils' sense of alienation deepened steadily. No major Sinhala-led political party seemed sensitive to their language or culture. The constitution and the government's own policies denied them equal political rights, discriminated against them in jobs and opportunity, and ignored their interests.
One more definition, and then the story reaches its worst point. A civil war is a violent conflict between opposing groups within one country. It grows intense enough to look like a war between nations, fought inside a single one.
Sri Lankan Tamils did not accept this quietly. They launched parties and struggles demanding Tamil be made an official language, demanding regional autonomy, demanding equal opportunity in education and jobs. Each demand for greater provincial autonomy was repeatedly denied.
By the 1980s, several political organisations were demanding something far larger: an independent Tamil Eelam, carved out of the north and east. Distrust between the two communities hardened into open conflict, and then into full civil war.
Thousands from both communities were killed. Many families became refugees; many more lost their livelihoods entirely. The war set back the country's social, cultural, and economic life for decades. It finally ended in 2009.
This is where majoritarianism, followed all the way through, actually leads — not a stronger country, but one that spent decades at war with itself.
Belgium's leaders faced the same kind of demographic tension Sri Lanka faced. They chose the opposite response.
Rather than let one community's majority decide everything, they recognised the country's regional and cultural differences as real. Between 1970 and 1993 they amended their constitution four separate times, working out an arrangement that let everyone live together in one country. The result is often called unlike any other country's arrangement — genuinely innovative, built to fit Belgium's own particular split.
The Belgian model rests on four elements. Hold all four in mind together — each one closes off a different way one community could otherwise dominate the other.
First, the constitution requires equal numbers of Dutch- and French-speaking ministers in the central government. Some laws need majority support from members of each linguistic group separately, so no single community can simply outvote the other.
Second, many of the Central Government's own powers were transferred down to the State Governments of the two regions. Those State Governments do not answer upward to the Centre for them.
Third, Brussels was given its own separate government, with equal representation for both communities. The French-speaking community accepted equal representation in the Central Government only because the Dutch-speaking community accepted equal representation in Brussels — each concession bought the other.
Fourth, a "community government" is elected by people belonging to one language community — Dutch, French, or German — no matter where in the country they actually live. It holds power over cultural, educational, and language-related matters for that community alone.
This arrangement is complicated — complicated enough that even Belgians find it hard to fully explain. But it has worked.
It helped Belgium avoid civic strife between its two major communities. It helped Belgium avoid the possible division of the country along linguistic lines that once threatened it. When the countries of Europe formed the European Union, they chose Brussels — the very city whose reversed language ratio once made it Belgium's hardest problem — as its headquarters.
Both Belgium and Sri Lanka are democracies. Both faced a country split between ethnic and linguistic communities. Yet they handled power-sharing in almost opposite ways.
Belgium's leaders understood that the country's unity was possible only by respecting different communities' feelings and interests. That respect produced power-sharing arrangements everyone could live with. Sri Lanka shows the opposite case: when a majority community forces its dominance and refuses to share power, the country's own unity is what gets undermined.
Test what you have just read against two ordinary students, one in each country. Annette studies at a Dutch-medium school in northern Belgium; many French-speaking students at her school want French added as a medium of instruction. Selvi studies at a school in northern Sri Lanka where every student is Tamil-speaking and wants Tamil as the medium of instruction.
If each child's parents went to their own government and asked for the change, who is more likely to succeed — and why? Work the two countries' own arrangements against each case before you decide; this chapter does not print the answer for you.
Two kinds of reason explain why power-sharing is good for a democracy. The first needs one more word defined: prudential means based on prudence — a careful calculation of gains and losses.
Prudential reasoning is usually set against reasoning based purely on moral considerations — exactly the contrast this section draws next.
The prudential case for power-sharing is a calculation about outcomes. Power-sharing reduces the chance of conflict between social groups. Social conflict so often tips into violence and political instability — sharing power is what keeps political order stable.
Imposing one majority community's will over everyone else can look attractive in the short run. Sri Lanka's own story shows what it costs in the long run: it undermines national unity. The tyranny of the majority is not only oppressive for the minority living under it — it tends to damage the majority community too.
There is a second reason, and it runs deeper than any calculation of outcomes. Power-sharing is the very spirit of democracy.
Democratic rule means sharing power with the people affected by its exercise, the people who must live with what it decides. People have a right to be consulted on how they are governed. A government earns real legitimacy only when its citizens hold an actual stake in the system, through participation, not merely a vote cast once every few years.
These two reasons even have their own names. The first is "prudential," the second "moral." Prudential reasons stress that power-sharing produces better outcomes — stability, avoided conflict. Moral reasons hold that the act of sharing power is valuable in itself, whatever outcome it produces.
Notice what these two reasons are not — they are not rivals competing for one correct answer. Both are offered as jointly true, two different grounds arriving at the same conclusion.
One more real story — and this one this chapter leaves open on purpose. In Beirut, Lebanon, after a civil war fought along the country's own religious lines, the country's leaders agreed a set of fixed power-sharing rules.
The President must be a Maronite Catholic Christian. The Prime Minister must be a Sunni Muslim. The Deputy Prime Minister must be an Orthodox Christian, and the Speaker a Shi'a Muslim. The rules were struck when Christians and Muslims were close to equal in population.
Both sides have kept respecting the pact ever since — even though Muslims are now a clear majority. Khalil is a popular man of mixed parentage; he practises neither parent's religion. Under this system he cannot reach the country's top position, however popular he is.
He asks a fair question: why can't Lebanon simply hold a normal election, where whoever wins the most votes becomes president, regardless of community? His elders, who lived through the civil war themselves, answer that the present system is the best guarantee of peace Lebanon has.
The story is left exactly there, unresolved. If you had the power to rewrite Lebanon's rules, would you adopt the "regular" election Khalil wants, keep the quota system, or choose something else? This chapter does not hand you an answer.
Return to the equation this chapter opened with: sharing power = dividing power = weakening the country. The idea of power-sharing arose against an older notion — that all of a government's power must sit undivided in one person or one group, in one place.
That older notion assumed dispersing decision-making power would only slow decisions down. Democracy changed this thinking at its root. One basic democratic principle is that the people are the source of all political power, ruling themselves through institutions of self-government.
A democracy owes genuine respect to a society's diverse groups and views, and gives everyone a real voice in shaping public policy. Follow that principle through, and one conclusion is unavoidable: political power should be distributed among as many citizens as possible. Modern democracies have worked out several distinct ways to do exactly that.
Form 1 — horizontal distribution. Power is shared among different organs of government at the same level — the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. Each one exercises a different power, so no single organ can hold unlimited power, and each one checks the others.
This is the "system of checks and balances" you have already met. Ministers and officials exercise power, but they remain answerable to Parliament or the State Assemblies. Judges are appointed by the executive, yet they can check both the executive's own conduct and the laws the legislature makes.
Form 2 — vertical, or federal, division. Power is shared among governments sitting at different levels instead of the same one. A general government runs the entire country (the federal, or in India the Central or Union, government). Governments at the provincial or regional level (State Governments, in India) sit below it.
Where this kind of division exists, the constitution itself clearly lays down what each level may do. This is exactly what Belgium's model did, and exactly what Sri Lanka refused. The same "federal division of power" extends further down still, to levels below the state, such as the municipality and the panchayat.
Horizontal and vertical are not two versions of the same idea, competing with each other — they are two independent axes of power-sharing. A country can run both of them at once, exactly as India does.
Form 3 — sharing among social groups. Power can also be shared among religious, linguistic, and other social groups directly. Belgium's own "community government" is a leading example.
Some countries build constitutional and legal arrangements to represent socially weaker sections and women in their legislatures and administrations — India's system of reserved constituencies is one such arrangement. The purpose is the same every time: giving diverse social groups, who might otherwise feel shut out of government altogether, a genuine share in power.
Form 4 — sharing through competition among contenders for power. Power-sharing shows up too in how political parties, pressure groups, and movements control or influence the people actually in power.
A democracy has to let citizens choose freely among several contenders. In practice this becomes party competition, which keeps power from settling permanently into one hand. Over the long run, power gets shared among parties representing different ideologies and social groups.
Sometimes the sharing is direct: two or more parties form an alliance to contest an election, and if elected, form a coalition government jointly. Interest groups — traders, businessmen, industrialists, farmers, industrial workers — get their own share of power too, whether by sitting on government committees or simply by influencing how decisions get made.
Put the four forms together, and you have the modern democratic vocabulary for how power actually gets distributed among citizens. Horizontal, among the organs of government. Vertical or federal, among levels of government.
Social-group, through community and reserved representation. Party or pressure-group, through open competition for power. Four different answers to one question — how does a democracy actually avoid letting power collect in one place?
Test the four forms against four real examples. Work out which form each one represents — who, in each case, is actually sharing power with whom?
The Bombay High Court ordered the Maharashtra State Government to immediately improve living conditions for about 2,000 children housed across seven children's homes in Mumbai. The government of Ontario, Canada, agreed a land-claim settlement with an aboriginal community, pledging to work with them in a spirit of mutual respect.
Russia's Union of Right Forces and Liberal Yabloko Movement agreed to unite into a single right-wing coalition, contesting the next election on one common list of candidates. Finance ministers from various Nigerian states demanded the federal government declare its sources of income, and the formula by which revenue gets shared with the states.
Work each case against the four forms yourself before you check your answer — the source prints no classification here either.