CDS (II) 2021 General Knowledge · Question 35 of 120

Correct — B, Granville Austin. Austin is the American historian of the Indian Constitution whose The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation (1966) supplied the vocabulary that Indian polity texts still use for Part IV. His reading is that the Constituent Assembly wrote two revolutions into the document — a political one, carried by the Fundamental Rights, and a social and economic one, carried by the Directive Principles — and that the two together form what he called the conscience of the Constitution. On that account the Directive Principles are not decorative; they are the instrument by which the State is meant to carry the social revolution forward, which is why Article 37 calls them fundamental in the governance of the country even while making them unenforceable in a court. None of the other three names is associated with that formulation.

• (a)B.N. Rau — B. N. Rau was Constitutional Adviser to the Constituent Assembly and prepared the original draft on which the Drafting Committee worked. He is remembered for the machinery of the drafting process, and for the suggestion that the Irish Directive Principles model be followed, rather than for a thesis about what the Principles were aiming at.
• (c)K.C. Wheare — K. C. Wheare's contribution to Indian constitutional vocabulary is the label quasi-federal, used for the strong centralising tilt of the Union-State relationship. His subject was the distribution of powers, not the purpose of Part IV.
• (d)Rajni Kothari — Rajni Kothari was an Indian political scientist best known for Politics in India (1970) and for the analysis of the Congress system of one-party dominance. His work is on party politics and democratic practice, not on the drafting logic of the Directive Principles.

Part IV of the Constitution, Articles 36 to 51, sets out the Directive Principles of State Policy. Article 37 makes them unenforceable by any court and, in the same breath, declares them fundamental in the governance of the country and a duty of the State to apply in making laws. The standard scholarly defence of that odd pairing is Granville Austin's — the Principles are the programme of a social and economic revolution, and a programme cannot be delivered by litigation.

Attribution items on the Constitution reward keeping one signature phrase against each name — social revolution and conscience of the Constitution for Austin, quasi-federal for Wheare, a federation with a strong centralising tendency for Jennings, bargaining federalism for Morris-Jones. A printed slip is worth flagging here: the phrase as it is quoted in the literature is furthering the goals of the social revolution, and this booklet prints social exclusion, which reverses the sense of what Austin argued. The attribution the question is testing is unaffected, since none of the other three names has ever been attached to any version of the sentence. Treat the wording as the textbook rendering of Austin's argument rather than as a verified verbatim quotation.

• Granville Austin wrote The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation (1966) and Working a Democratic Constitution: The Indian Experience (1999).
• He described the Fundamental Rights and the Directive Principles together as the conscience of the Constitution.
• Article 37 makes the Directive Principles non-justiciable yet fundamental in the governance of the country.
• The Directive Principles were modelled on the Irish Constitution of 1937, which in turn drew on the Spanish Constitution.
• K. C. Wheare's phrase for India is quasi-federal; Rajni Kothari's contribution is the analysis of the Congress system.

• Reading non-justiciable as unimportant; Article 37 says the opposite in the same sentence.
• Attributing quasi-federal to Austin, whose phrase is about the social revolution, not about the distribution of powers.
• Assuming B. N. Rau drafted the Constitution as its author; he prepared the initial draft as Constitutional Adviser, and the Drafting Committee under Ambedkar produced the text.

As a who-said-it attribution, or folded into a matching list of thinkers and their labels for the Indian Constitution.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Granville Austin described which pair of constitutional provisions as the ‘conscience of the Constitution’?

  • (a)The Preamble and the Fundamental Duties
  • (b)The Fundamental Rights and the Directive Principles of State Policy
  • (c)The Seventh Schedule and Article 356
  • (d)The Fundamental Duties and the Directive Principles of State Policy

  Answer(b) The Fundamental Rights and the Directive Principles of State Policy — the political revolution and the social revolution taken together.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The idea of Directive Principles of State Policy in the Constitution of India was borrowed from the Constitution of

  • (a)the United States of America
  • (b)Ireland
  • (c)Canada
  • (d)Australia

  Answer(b) Ireland — the Irish Constitution of 1937 carried directive principles of social policy, itself influenced by the Spanish text.