MPSC 2021 Prelims Paper-I · Question 73 of 100

Correct — option (3), which names statement (d) alone. Before anything else, read the stem again. It asks who is NOT directly participating in the election of the President, so the task is to find the entry in the list that has no vote, and every statement describing someone who does vote is to be rejected. This paper carries seven negative or exclusionary stems and sets the negation in bold in six of them in the English column — but not in this one. The word 'not' here is in ordinary type, and so is 'नाही' in the Marathi column, which bolds only five, having left Q57 unmarked as well, while the question immediately before it has its key word 'correct' set in bold. A candidate who has spent thirty questions being warned by the typography gets no warning at all at the one place in the paper where the inversion is most expensive, so this stem has to be read rather than glanced at. Now the law. Article 54 states that the President is elected by an electoral college consisting of the elected members of both Houses of Parliament and the elected members of the Legislative Assemblies of the States. An Explanation added by the Constitution (Seventieth Amendment) Act, 1992 extends the expression 'State' for this purpose to include the National Capital Territory of Delhi and the Union territory of Puducherry, so the elected members of those two Assemblies vote as well. That accounts for the first three statements: elected members of the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha do vote, elected members of the State Legislative Assemblies do vote, and elected members of the Delhi and Puducherry Assemblies do vote. Statement (d) is the odd one out, and it is excluded twice over. First, the Constitution's list speaks only of Legislative Assemblies, so no member of a State Legislative Council has any part in the election of the President, whether that member was elected or nominated — the upper chamber of a State legislature is left out of the electoral college entirely. Second, the article says 'elected members' throughout, so nominated members are excluded everywhere: the twelve members nominated to the Rajya Sabha do not vote, and neither do nominated members of any Assembly. Statement (d) manages to combine both disqualifications in one line by naming the elected and the nominated members of the Councils together. The reason for the design is worth knowing. The President is the head of the whole federal structure, and the electoral college is built so that the value of the votes of the States taken together equals the value of the votes of the two Houses of Parliament, with each State weighted by its population. Members who were nominated rather than elected are left out because the college is meant to reflect the choice of the electorate, and Legislative Councils are left out because they are not directly elected bodies and only some States have one. The keyed option is therefore the one naming statement (d) by itself.

• (1)(a), (b) — This names statements (a) and (b), and both of them describe voters rather than non-voters. Article 54 puts the elected members of both Houses of Parliament and the elected members of the Legislative Assemblies of the States at the very centre of the electoral college — they are the two limbs the article expressly lists. Note what the word 'elected' is doing in statement (a): it is the reason the statement is accurate. The twelve members nominated to the Rajya Sabha by the President, and the members formerly nominated to the Lok Sabha under the Anglo-Indian provision that the 104th Amendment Act discontinued, have never had a vote in a presidential election. An option that pairs two undoubted voters is a trap for the candidate who has read the stem as though it asked who does participate, which on a negative question of this kind is the single commonest way of losing the mark.
• (2)(b), (c) — This names statements (b) and (c), the elected members of the State Legislative Assemblies and the elected members of the Assemblies of Delhi and Puducherry, and both of them vote. The second of the two is the more interesting, and it is where a well-prepared candidate can talk himself into an error. Union territories are, as a rule, outside the presidential electoral college, and for most of them that remains true. But the Constitution (Seventieth Amendment) Act, 1992 added an Explanation to Article 54 bringing the National Capital Territory of Delhi and the Union territory of Puducherry within the expression 'State' for this purpose, precisely because both have elected Legislative Assemblies of their own. A candidate who remembers the general rule about Union territories but not the amendment will read statement (c) as describing non-voters and may land here.
• (4)(a), (c) — This names statements (a) and (c) — the elected members of the two Houses of Parliament and the elected members of the Delhi and Puducherry Assemblies — and once again both describe participants rather than the excluded. The option is really a variation on the previous one, built from the same misreading of the position of Delhi and Puducherry, and it is worth using to fix the whole map in place. Those who vote for the President are the elected members of the Lok Sabha, the elected members of the Rajya Sabha, the elected members of every State Legislative Assembly, and the elected members of the Assemblies of Delhi and Puducherry. Those who do not are the nominated members of either House, the nominated members of any Assembly, and every member of every State Legislative Council. Set the list out that way and no rearrangement of the four statements can catch a candidate.

The President of India is elected indirectly, by an electoral college defined in Article 54, and by a method defined in Article 55. The college consists of the elected members of both Houses of Parliament and the elected members of the Legislative Assemblies of the States, and since the Constitution (Seventieth Amendment) Act, 1992 it includes the elected members of the Legislative Assemblies of the National Capital Territory of Delhi and the Union territory of Puducherry. Nominated members are excluded throughout, and members of State Legislative Councils have no part in the election at all. Article 55 requires as far as practicable uniformity in the scale of representation of the different States and parity between the States as a whole and the Union: the value of a Member of the Legislative Assembly's vote is obtained by dividing the population of the State by the total number of elected members of that Assembly and then dividing by one thousand, while the value of a Member of Parliament's vote is the total value of all the Assembly votes divided by the total number of elected members of both Houses. The population used for this purpose is that of the 1971 census, frozen there by the Constitution (Eighty-fourth Amendment) Act, 2001 until the figures of the first census taken after the year 2026 are published. The election is held by proportional representation by means of the single transferable vote, and the voting is by secret ballot; a candidate must secure a quota of more than half the total value of the votes polled, second preferences being transferred if no one reaches it on the first count. Disputes about the election are decided by the Supreme Court under Article 71, and an election cannot be called in question on the ground that the electoral college was incomplete because of a vacancy.

The presidential election is one of the most heavily examined single topics in the polity portion of MPSC's syllabus, because it can be asked from many angles — who is in the electoral college, who is left out, how the value of a vote is calculated, which census is used, what system of voting is prescribed, who decides disputes. The construction used here, a list of categories with a negative stem, is the Commission's favourite way of testing it, and the question turns almost entirely on whether the candidate reads the word 'not'. That is why this particular item deserves special attention: the paper sets the negation in bold in six of its seven negative stems and leaves it in ordinary type here, so a candidate whose eye has been trained by the rest of the paper is given no signal at all. The habit to build is mechanical and reliable — underline the negation in the question booklet before looking at the options, and decide each statement as a plain true or false about participation before matching the verdicts to an option. The second habit is to prepare the presidential electoral college alongside the vice-presidential one, since the Commission repeatedly tests the difference between them.

• Article 54: the President is elected by an electoral college consisting of the elected members of both Houses of Parliament and the elected members of the Legislative Assemblies of the States.
• The Constitution (Seventieth Amendment) Act, 1992 extended the expression 'State' in Article 54 to include the National Capital Territory of Delhi and the Union territory of Puducherry, so the elected members of those two Assemblies also vote.
• No member of a State Legislative Council takes part in the election of the President, whether elected or nominated, because Article 54 names only the Legislative Assemblies; nominated members of Parliament and of Assemblies are excluded as well.
• Article 55 prescribes proportional representation by means of the single transferable vote with voting by secret ballot, and weights the votes so that the States as a whole carry the same value as the two Houses of Parliament together.
• The vice-presidential electoral college under Article 66 is different: it consists of the members of both Houses of Parliament, elected and nominated alike, and no member of any State legislature takes part in it.

• Missing an unbolded negation: six of the seven negative stems in this paper set the negation in bold and this one does not, so the reading of the stem cannot be left to the typography
• Forgetting that members of State Legislative Councils have no vote in the presidential election at all, whether they were elected or nominated
• Overlooking the Seventieth Amendment Act, 1992 and treating the elected members of the Delhi and Puducherry Assemblies as excluded along with other Union territories
• Confusing the presidential electoral college, which excludes nominated members but includes State legislators, with the vice-presidential one, which includes nominated members of Parliament but no State legislators at all

MPSC asks the presidential election as composition questions of the kind set here, as arithmetic questions on the value of an MLA's or an MP's vote, as method questions on the single transferable vote and the secret ballot, and as comparison questions against the election of the Vice-President. The negative form is common, and the Commission also uses the 'consider the following statements' format in which one statement quietly adds nominated members or Council members to the electoral college. Beyond the election itself the office is examined through impeachment under Article 61, the ordinance power under Article 123, the veto powers including the pocket veto, and the emergency provisions. A candidate who can write out, without hesitation, exactly who votes and exactly who does not, and who can state the two differences between the presidential and vice-presidential colleges, will handle nearly every question this topic produces.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The elected members of the Legislative Assemblies of Delhi and Puducherry were included in the electoral college for the election of the President by which Constitutional Amendment Act ?

  • (a)The 61st Amendment Act, 1988
  • (b)The 70th Amendment Act, 1992
  • (c)The 73rd Amendment Act, 1992
  • (d)The 84th Amendment Act, 2001

  Answer(b) The 70th Amendment Act, 1992 — it added an Explanation to Article 54 providing that the expression 'State' in that article and in Article 55 includes the National Capital Territory of Delhi and the Union territory of Puducherry, so the elected members of those two Assemblies vote in the presidential election although other Union territories have no part in it. The 61st Amendment reduced the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen, the 73rd Amendment gave constitutional status to the panchayats, and the 84th Amendment froze the population figure used in the calculation of vote values at the 1971 census.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following is a difference between the electoral college for the President and that for the Vice-President ?

  • (a)Nominated members of Parliament vote in the election of the Vice-President but not in that of the President
  • (b)Members of State Legislative Assemblies vote in the election of the Vice-President but not in that of the President
  • (c)Members of State Legislative Councils vote in the election of the President but not in that of the Vice-President
  • (d)The Vice-President is elected by open ballot and the President by secret ballot

  Answer(a) Nominated members of Parliament vote in the election of the Vice-President but not in that of the President — the electoral college for the Vice-President under Article 66 consists of the members of both Houses of Parliament, elected and nominated alike, whereas Article 54 admits only elected members to the presidential college. The other great difference runs the opposite way from option (b): State legislators vote for the President but have no part at all in the election of the Vice-President. Members of State Legislative Councils vote in neither election, and both elections are held by secret ballot.