The comparison often serves to contrast formal power-sharing with its absence, but both models are fundamentally strained by treating ethnic identity as the primary political currency, which ossifies divisions rather than fostering a shared civic identity. My years in Gangtok, seeing how cultural preservation can be gentle and lived rather than politically mandated, convince me of this. A government structure built on listing groups, as in Belgium, or denying them, as in Sri Lanka, both start from the same flawed premise of competition. I learned from my old students that harmony, like in a raag, isn’t achieved by giving each instrument a separate room to play in.
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