![]() ![]() Ironically both the executive and the parliament in India have remained weak during the ‘democratic upsurge’ era, while some non-parliamentary institutions have succeeded in asserting their autonomy. Unlike in Western democracies, the decline of Indian parliament is not due to strengthening of the executive. It redraws the focus away from formal structures to various methods of power sharing that run through all levels of society and the role played by civil society organizations, interest groups, and ethno-political organizations.Īlthough the Indian Parliament has witnessed progressive democratization in terms of representation of various sections of society, it has declined as an effective institution of accountability. ![]() The paper is based on a study carried out in India. With movements and protests becoming central to state-society interactive processes, this paper looks at power sharing and political bargaining as an institutional strategy that ethnic groups employ for addressing their grievances, particularly in diverse societies. Political representation, beyond the domain of electoral politics, is an important nonmilitary institutional strategy for expressing perceived inequalities and for negotiating conflict in ethnically divided societies. It is this that can become a condition for likelihood of ethnic conflict. An important condition that underlies the state-ethnic group(s) causal interface is the perceived inequalities of communities. On the other hand, the emphasis on the cultural base of the state has brought the state-system into the core of the state-society causal argument, driving interactive processes. This, on one hand, has brought a shift in the focus on state and the modern state-system in studies on ethnic conflict, from the conventional perspective that viewed ethnic conflicts as a condition under state failure. With interest in social institutions expanding, and the centering of attention on state as an institution that is essentially cultural, a major interest in recent literature on ethnicity studies is on people, communities, and societies-(i) as collective actors in relation with the state as the sovereign authority and (ii) the process of interface between the state and the ethnic groups that constitute the ethno-demographic profile of the state. ![]()
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