Closer home, in Pakistan the Pakistan Peoples Party and Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz Sharif) formed a government earlier this year despite long years of intense conflict and antagonism — an experiment that now seems to be unravelling.

•Are grand coalitions more representative and/or desirable?

The first two varieties exist to fulfil certain higher order concerns. The parliamentary bargaining variety of grand coalition is a blatant exemplar of collusive behaviour among competitors and in a market situation they would be dismissed as cartels. They appear to have two perceived advantages. One, they represent a greater majority of the electorate. Two, there are less likely to be policy logjams.

P.A. Sangma’s suggestion appears to be based on these two supposed advantages. The greater representation thesis may not hold good as grand coalitions of the third variety are a result of post-electoral bargaining and negotiation. The electorate may have voted for the parties in a grand coalition but not necessarily the grand coalition itself. Preventing policy logjams through grand coalitions could be a solution worse than the problem in as much as it creates a powerless opposition that cannot check the government.

Secondly, if grand coalition experiments continue for a long period, what happens to governmental change? Finally, extreme and fringe parties could tap into the inevitable disenchantment and occupy legitimate opposition space.

•What about grand coalitions in India?

Central governments in India have always been representative of India’s diversity in the grand coalition variety of the first type. A study of successive cabinets will reveal that there has always been a conscious attempt to balance representation of different groups, in terms of caste, religion, state or language. The formation of federal coalitions since 1989 has accentuated this representative feature more strongly.

... contd.