MPSC 2023 Prelims Paper-I · Question 85 of 100

Correct — option (1), 'Only I correct'. Begin with the stem, because this is a negative question and nothing on the page marks it as one: the words 'does not include' are printed in ordinary type, and they carry the entire item. The stem is also elliptical in the ENGLISH column — the मराठी column prints a complete, determinate sentence, so this is a defect of one column rather than of the question — 'the following provisions was/were included. Which Article does not include ?' breaks off with no object after 'include' — so the sense has to be reconstructed from the four Roman items. What the question is asking is which of the four provisions listed was NOT part of the Constitution that emerged from the Constituent Assembly's debates. Read that way it has a clean answer. Item I is the Fundamental Duties under Article 51A, and these were not in the Constitution the Assembly adopted on 26 November 1949. Part IVA, consisting of the single Article 51A, was inserted by the Constitution (Forty-second Amendment) Act, 1976, on the recommendation of the Swaran Singh Committee appointed by the government during the Emergency, more than a quarter of a century after the Assembly had risen. The Assembly never debated them, because there was nothing to debate: a chapter on the duties of the citizen was not part of the draft before it. The other three items are all provisions of the Constitution as originally adopted, and each of them was argued over at length in the Assembly. Article 368, the amending power, was the subject of a long debate on how rigid the Constitution should be, and Dr Ambedkar defended the mixed scheme that emerged, in which some provisions yield to an ordinary majority, most to a special majority, and the federal provisions only to a special majority plus ratification by the States. Article 352, the proclamation of a national emergency, drew some of the sharpest criticism in the Assembly, members warning that the emergency provisions could convert the federation into a unitary state; Ambedkar answered that the flexibility was a strength rather than a defect. Article 123, the President's power to promulgate ordinances, was attacked as undemocratic and defended as a necessary provision for a situation demanding immediate action when Parliament is not in session. So three of the four provisions came out of the Assembly's debates and one did not, which makes item I the odd one and option (1) the answer.

• (2)Only II correct — 'Only II correct' points at Article 368, the power to amend the Constitution, and that Article was very much part of the Constitution the Constituent Assembly adopted. It sits in Part XX of the original text and was among the more closely argued provisions before the Assembly, precisely because the choice between a rigid and a flexible Constitution was understood to be a choice about how the document would survive its first decades. The scheme settled on was deliberately graded, and it is the one still in force: a special majority of each House for most amendments, with ratification by the legislatures of not less than one-half of the States for the entrenched federal matters listed in the proviso to Article 368(2). What has changed since 1950 is the law around the Article, not its presence — clauses (4) and (5) were added by the 42nd Amendment and struck down in Minerva Mills, and the basic structure doctrine of Kesavananda Bharati limits what the power can reach. None of that bears on whether the Assembly included Article 368, which it plainly did.
• (3)All of the above are correct — 'All of the above are correct' would mean that every one of the four provisions falls outside what the Constituent Assembly's discussions produced, and that is demonstrably untrue for three of them. Articles 368, 352 and 123 all appear in the Constitution as adopted on 26 November 1949 and as brought into force on 26 January 1950, and all three were debated in the Assembly, the emergency provisions and the ordinance power especially warmly. A candidate who reads the stem loosely can end up here by treating the question as asking which items are correct statements about the Constitution — under that misreading all four are indeed genuine constitutional provisions with the Article numbers correctly given, and 'All of the above' looks right. That misreading is exactly what the negative stem is designed to catch. The question is not whether these Articles exist; it is which of them was not part of what the Assembly produced.
• (4)None of the above are correct — 'None of the above are correct' denies that any of the four items is the odd one out, which cannot stand once Article 51A is examined. The Fundamental Duties were introduced by the 42nd Amendment in 1976, a date that by itself settles the question: the Constituent Assembly held its first sitting on 9 December 1946 and adopted the Constitution on 26 November 1949, so a Part inserted in 1976 cannot have come from its discussions. This option is the refuge of a candidate who has found the stem unreadable — and the stem here is genuinely defective, with no object after 'include' and with options (1) and (2) printed as 'Only I correct' and 'Only II correct', without a verb — and who concludes that no answer can be right. A defective stem still has a keyed answer, and the safer course is to reconstruct the question from the items rather than to reject it. Here the items are dated provisions, three from 1949 and one from 1976, which points to a single sensible reading.

The Fundamental Duties are the clearest example in the Constitution of a Part that the Constituent Assembly never saw. The Constitution as adopted set out Fundamental Rights in Part III and Directive Principles of State Policy in Part IV, rights enforceable in court and principles fundamental to governance but not enforceable, and it said nothing about what a citizen owes in return. Part IVA was inserted by the Constitution (Forty-second Amendment) Act, 1976, on the recommendation of a committee headed by Sardar Swaran Singh, appointed while the Emergency was in force; the idea of enumerating citizens' duties is generally traced in Indian constitutional writing to the Soviet constitution, which was among the few that carried such a chapter. Article 51A originally listed ten duties, including abiding by the Constitution and respecting its ideals, cherishing the ideals of the freedom struggle, upholding the sovereignty and integrity of India, protecting the natural environment, developing the scientific temper and safeguarding public property. An eleventh was added by the Constitution (Eighty-sixth Amendment) Act, 2002, obliging a parent or guardian to provide opportunities for education to a child between six and fourteen years — the same amendment that inserted Article 21A. Like the Directive Principles, the duties are not directly enforceable; unlike them, they address the citizen rather than the State.

This question sits in the family MPSC uses to test whether a candidate knows the difference between what the Constituent Assembly wrote and what later Parliaments added, and the Fundamental Duties are the standard example because they arrived through a famous amendment on the recommendation of a named committee. Other provisions regularly used the same way are the words 'socialist', 'secular' and 'integrity' in the Preamble, also from the 42nd Amendment; Article 21A on the right to education, from the 86th; and the anti-defection provisions in the Tenth Schedule, from the 52nd. The question also demands the discipline that negative stems always demand, and this paper makes that harder than the 2024 edition did, because the negation is printed in ordinary type with nothing to warn the reader. Seven questions in this paper carry a negative or exclusionary stem, and the reliable procedure is mechanical: read the stem twice, write in the margin what you are hunting for, then judge each item separately before returning to the options. Finally, this item is worth remembering as an example of a defective question that still has a determinate answer. The stem is elliptical and options (1) and (2) are printed without a verb, but the four items are dated provisions and only one of them post-dates the Assembly, so the reconstruction is not really in doubt. Time spent complaining about the printing in the hall is time not spent answering.

• The Fundamental Duties were not part of the Constitution adopted by the Constituent Assembly on 26 November 1949; Part IVA and Article 51A were inserted by the Constitution (Forty-second Amendment) Act, 1976.
• The insertion followed the recommendation of the committee headed by Sardar Swaran Singh, appointed by the government while the Emergency was in force; Indian constitutional writing traces the idea of a chapter of citizens' duties to the Soviet constitution.
• Article 51A originally listed ten duties; an eleventh, requiring a parent or guardian to provide education opportunities to a child of six to fourteen years, was added by the Constitution (Eighty-sixth Amendment) Act, 2002.
• Article 368, the amendment power, Article 352, the proclamation of national emergency, and Article 123, the President's ordinance-making power, were all in the Constitution as originally adopted and were all debated in the Constituent Assembly.
• The Constituent Assembly first met on 9 December 1946 and adopted the Constitution on 26 November 1949, which came into force on 26 January 1950 — so any Part inserted by a later amendment cannot have come from its debates.

• Missing the negation in the stem, which is printed in ordinary type here with nothing to mark it, and answering the opposite question
• Treating the items as claims about whether these Articles exist, when the question is about whether the Constituent Assembly produced them
• Assuming that a Part appearing early in the Constitution's numbering is necessarily part of the original text — Part IVA sits between Parts IV and V but dates from 1976
• Abandoning a question because the printed English is broken, when the four dated items still fix a single sensible reading

The Constituent Assembly and the amendment history of the Constitution supply a steady stream of MPSC questions, usually in one of three shapes: which provision was in the original Constitution, which amendment inserted a named provision, and which committee or report a provision came from. The Fundamental Duties answer all three at once — original text, no; inserting amendment, the 42nd; source, the Swaran Singh Committee — which is why they appear so often. Negative stems are the Commission's preferred way of setting such questions, because they force the candidate to verify every item rather than to recognise one, and this paper prints its negations without any typographic warning. The efficient preparation is a single list of provisions that were added later, with the amendment number and year against each: Fundamental Duties and the Preamble's added words in 1976, the right to education in 2002, anti-defection in 1985, panchayats and municipalities in 1992, and the Goods and Services Tax in 2016.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Fundamental Duties were inserted into the Constitution on the recommendation of which committee ?

  • (a)The Sarkaria Commission
  • (b)The Swaran Singh Committee
  • (c)The Punchhi Commission
  • (d)The Santhanam Committee

  Answer(b) The Swaran Singh Committee — appointed while the Emergency was in force, it recommended a chapter of citizens' duties, and Part IVA containing Article 51A was inserted by the Constitution (Forty-second Amendment) Act, 1976. The Sarkaria Commission and the Punchhi Commission both examined centre-State relations, in the 1980s and the 2000s respectively, and the Santhanam Committee reported on the prevention of corruption and led to the Central Vigilance Commission.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following was NOT part of the Constitution as adopted by the Constituent Assembly in 1949 ?

  • (a)The power of the President to promulgate ordinances under Article 123
  • (b)The proclamation of a national emergency under Article 352
  • (c)The Fundamental Duties under Article 51A
  • (d)The procedure for amendment under Article 368

  Answer(c) The Fundamental Duties under Article 51A — Part IVA was inserted by the 42nd Amendment in 1976, twenty-seven years after the Assembly adopted the Constitution. The ordinance power, the national emergency provision and the amending procedure were all in the original text and all three were debated at length in the Assembly, the emergency provisions drawing particularly sharp criticism from members who feared the federation could be converted into a unitary state.