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This article uses evidence from India to reassess the value of consociational power sharing as a method of reducing ethnic violence. I present evidence to disprove Arend Lijphart's recent claim that India was, under Jawaharlal Nehru, a de facto consociational state and that India's consociational character during the 1950s and 1960s explains the country's relatively low level of ethnic violence during these years. I argue that, especially as far as India's important Muslim minority was concerned, India was a non-consociational ranked state in the two decades after Independence. Since the mid-1960s, however, India has become more consociational, while the country's level of ethnic violence has risen. For reasons identified by Myron Weiner in Sons of the Soil-for example the tendency of so-called Backward segments within ethnic groups to agitate for recognition as separate ethnic groups, deserving of their own …