UNITY IN DIVERSITY 31 experience of that society and the contemporaneous perception of that experience. All large societies have had to find ways of coping with this diversity in their composition and the possible strains that this might have given rise to in the economic, social, political and religio-cultural spheres of life. Diversity poses problems to societies in two ways. First, differences imply a commitment of different groups to different styles of living and to different value frameworks and questions often arise about which life-style should prevail. Besides, diversity has also a way of giving rise to disparities, to unequal access to opportunities and to an unequal share in the power structure of society. Political institutions, in so far as they seek to ensure or promote 'order1 and stability in society, have to find ways of either minimising these disparities and/or of interpreting, explaining and justifying them within the contemporary framework of values accepted or tolerated by people at that time and place. Historically speaking, equality was not always the core value for organising political, economic or social relationships between individuals or groups in society. Inequality prevailed, particularly in the relatively large societies, and was accepted as god-given— whether in the form of the divine right of kings and the birth-right of the nobility or in the form of the innate superiority of certain castes or races. Human beings, particularly those from deprived groups in society, must have questioned, if not resented, the inequities of life even then but the economic and political realities of those times did not support the emergence of an ideology of the equality of all human beings. Occasionally were there individuals from privileged groups who questioned the prevalent inequalities of access to opportunity and power either on the religio-philosophical grounds of the essential equality of all human beings or for reasons of compassion, human sympathy and charity. Generally, however, those in power took their privileges for granted and had no qualms about putting down by force any efforts by the deprived to question them. • ' While diversity in ways of living often gives rise to hierarchy, and therefore , to inequality and deprivation, the hierarchical social system may, in its turn, prove conducive to the tolerance and in fact promotion of differentiation in the ways of living of the different groups so long as they do not claim equal access to a society's resdurces. Groups relegated to lower strata could be prevented from adopting the life-styles of the higher strata and persuaded of the legitimacy of this arrangement. Yet hierarchisation is not the only, and certainly not the best way of accommodating differences. Usually the broader process of hierarchisation was accompanied by a process of co-option of the elite elements from among the conquered or won over populations. This was necessary both to meet the needs of functional efficiency as also for