MPSC 2022 Prelims Paper-I · Question 65 of 100

Correct — option (2), statement (b) alone. The list here has three statements, (a) to (c), not four, and all three are drawn from Article 20 of the Constitution, which reads in its three clauses: no person shall be convicted of any offence except for violation of a law in force at the time of the commission of the act charged as an offence, nor be subjected to a penalty greater than that which might have been inflicted under the law in force at the time of the commission of the offence; no person shall be prosecuted and punished for the same offence more than once; and no person accused of any offence shall be compelled to be a witness against himself. Statement (b) is correct. The protection against self-incrimination in Article 20(3) is a protection against being compelled to be a witness, and testimony is not confined to the spoken word — it covers what a person says on oath and equally what a person is compelled to produce in the form of a personal record or statement, so both oral evidence and documentary evidence fall inside the guarantee. The settled position also marks out what falls outside it, and the boundary is the one worth learning: the clause does not protect against the compulsory production of material objects, against being required to give a thumb impression, a specimen signature, a specimen of handwriting or a sample of blood, or against the compulsory exhibition of the body. The distinction underlying the line is between compelling a person to furnish testimony out of his own knowledge, which is barred, and obtaining physical evidence from his person, which is not. Statement (a) is not correct, and the words that break it are the last three. Article 20(2) protects against being prosecuted and punished for the same offence more than once, but the protection operates only in proceedings before a court of law or a judicial tribunal. A departmental or administrative proceeding is not of that character; it is a disciplinary inquiry by an employer into the conduct of a servant, not a prosecution for an offence. A public servant convicted and punished by a criminal court may therefore still face departmental action arising out of the same facts, and the rider added to statement (a) asserts the opposite. Statement (c) is not correct either. The guarantee in Article 20(3) opens with the words no person accused of any offence, which confine it to criminal proceedings; it does not extend to civil proceedings or to proceedings that are not criminal in nature. Since statement (b) alone is correct, and neither statement (a) nor statement (c) survives, the answer is option (2). Notice how the question is engineered: each false statement is a true proposition with a false extension bolted on to the end of it, so a candidate who reads only as far as the familiar part will accept both.

• (1)Statement (a) is correct — This option asserts that statement (a) is correct, and it is not. The first half of the statement reproduces Article 20(2) faithfully — no person shall be prosecuted and punished for the same offence more than once — and it is the tail, including any departmental proceedings, that makes it false. The protection against double jeopardy is available only where there has been a prosecution before a court of law or a judicial tribunal; a departmental inquiry conducted by an administrative authority is not a prosecution and does not attract the clause, so a person may be tried by a criminal court and separately proceeded against by his department on the same facts. There is a second narrowing worth knowing, because it is asked in its own right: the Indian clause protects only where the person has been both prosecuted and punished, a formulation the Constituent Assembly settled on deliberately when it revised the draft, and it is therefore narrower than the English rules of autrefois acquit and autrefois convict, which bar a second trial after an acquittal as well. An option that endorses a statement carrying an added rider should always prompt a check of the rider before the familiar opening.
• (3)Statements (a) and (b) are correct — This option requires statements (a) and (b) both to be correct. Statement (b) is, but statement (a) is not, for the reason set out above: Article 20(2) does not reach departmental proceedings, and the words including any departmental proceedings falsify a statement that would otherwise have been a fair paraphrase of the clause. The option is the most attractive of the three wrong ones precisely because it contains the true statement, and it illustrates the standard defence against this format — having identified the statement you are sure of, do not go looking for an option that contains it, because several will; go looking for the statement you are sure is false and eliminate every option that contains that instead. Here, once statement (a) is seen to fail, options (1), (3) and (4) all fall together, since each of them asserts that statement (a) is correct, and only option (2) is left standing. Working by elimination on the false statement is faster and safer than working by confirmation on the true one.
• (4)Statements (a) and (c) are correct — This option requires statements (a) and (c) both to be correct, and neither is. Statement (a) fails on the departmental proceedings rider. Statement (c) fails on a plainer point: the protection against self-incrimination is given by Article 20(3) to a person accused of any offence, so it belongs to criminal proceedings and does not extend to civil ones. The reason for the limit is structural. Article 20 as a whole is headed protection in respect of conviction for offences, and all three of its clauses — no retrospective criminal law, no double jeopardy, no compelled self-incrimination — are protections of a person facing the criminal power of the state. A party to a civil suit is in a different position: he faces another private party, not the state's power to punish, and the rules of civil procedure require parties to disclose documents and to answer interrogatories. Notice also that this option leaves out statement (b), the one statement in the list that is correct, so it is wrong on all three counts.

Article 20 of the Constitution gathers three distinct protections for a person facing the criminal power of the state, and its heading, protection in respect of conviction for offences, is the key to all three. Clause (1) bars ex post facto criminal law: a person may be convicted only for the violation of a law in force when the act was done, and may not be subjected to a penalty greater than the one that could have been imposed under the law as it then stood. The bar applies to criminal law only, not to civil or tax legislation, and it prevents a heavier penalty being applied retrospectively while permitting a lighter one. Clause (2) is the rule against double jeopardy: no person shall be prosecuted and punished for the same offence more than once. Two limits define its reach. It operates only in proceedings before a court of law or a judicial tribunal, so a departmental or administrative inquiry does not attract it and may follow a criminal trial on the same facts; and it requires both prosecution and punishment, so it is narrower than the common law rules of autrefois acquit and autrefois convict, which bar a fresh trial after an acquittal as well. Clause (3) protects against self-incrimination: no person accused of any offence shall be compelled to be a witness against himself. It is available only to a person accused of an offence, only in criminal proceedings, and only against compulsion. Within those limits it extends to both oral and documentary evidence, but it has never been read to cover the compulsory production of material objects, the taking of a thumb impression, a specimen signature or handwriting, a sample of blood, or the exhibition of the body — the line being drawn between compelling testimony from a person's own knowledge and obtaining physical evidence from his person. Article 20 is one of the two articles, with Article 21, whose enforcement cannot be suspended even during a Proclamation of Emergency, a protection added by the Forty-fourth Amendment of 1978.

Fundamental Rights are the most heavily examined block of the polity syllabus, and Articles 19 to 22 carry more questions than the rest of Part III together because they contain the sharpest and most quotable rules. MPSC's preferred way of testing Article 20 is the one used here: take a correct statement of the law and add a short extension that reverses it. Statement (a) reproduces the double jeopardy clause accurately and then extends it to departmental proceedings, which is exactly where the clause stops. Statement (c) reproduces the self-incrimination guarantee accurately and then extends it to civil proceedings, which is exactly where that clause stops. A candidate who has learnt the clauses but not their boundaries will read the familiar opening of each statement, recognise it, and mark it correct. The boundaries, in other words, are the examinable content, and the working rule for preparation is that for every fundamental right one should learn three things and not one — what the right guarantees, whom it is available to, and what it does not cover. This question also rewards a technique. Three of the four options assert that statement (a) is correct; identifying that one false statement therefore eliminates three options at a stroke, which is much faster than testing each option in turn against all three statements. In a statement-and-option question, hunting for the falsifier is almost always the shorter path.

• Article 20(2) provides that no person shall be prosecuted and punished for the same offence more than once, and the protection operates only in proceedings before a court of law or a judicial tribunal — not in departmental or administrative proceedings, which may follow a criminal trial on the same facts.
• Because the clause requires both prosecution and punishment, the Indian rule is narrower than the common law rules of autrefois acquit and autrefois convict, which also bar a second trial after an acquittal.
• Article 20(3) provides that no person accused of any offence shall be compelled to be a witness against himself; the protection is confined to criminal proceedings and is not available in civil proceedings.
• Within criminal proceedings the protection extends to both oral evidence and documentary evidence, but not to the compulsory production of material objects, the taking of thumb impressions, specimen signatures or handwriting or blood samples, or the compulsory exhibition of the body.
• Article 20(1) bars ex post facto criminal law — conviction only for the violation of a law in force when the act was done, and no penalty greater than the one then available — and Article 20, along with Article 21, cannot be suspended even during a Proclamation of Emergency, by virtue of the Forty-fourth Amendment of 1978.

• Extending the double jeopardy rule of Article 20(2) to departmental or administrative proceedings, when it operates only before a court of law or a judicial tribunal
• Extending the protection against self-incrimination to civil proceedings, when Article 20(3) opens with the words no person accused of any offence and is confined to the criminal process
• Forgetting that Article 20(3) does cover documentary evidence as well as oral evidence, while not covering thumb impressions, specimen signatures, blood samples or the production of material objects
• Reading only the familiar opening of a statement and marking it correct, when the falsifying words in this format are almost always at the end

Article 20 is set repeatedly in MPSC papers, and in three shapes. The first is the direct question — which article contains the protection against double jeopardy, or which clause bars ex post facto criminal law. The second is the statement list used here, in which the clause is stated correctly and then over-extended, so that the candidate is really being asked where the right stops rather than what it says. The third is an application question, in which a short fact situation is given and the candidate must say whether the right is attracted: a public servant convicted by a court and then dismissed after a departmental inquiry, or a suspect asked for a specimen signature. All three reward the same preparation, which is a table with one row per right and columns for the text, the beneficiary, the proceedings in which it applies and the express exclusions. Two rows of that table are asked more often than any others — the departmental proceedings exclusion from Article 20(2) and the physical evidence exclusion from Article 20(3).

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following is NOT protected by the guarantee against self-incrimination in Article 20(3) of the Constitution ?

  • (a)Compulsion to make an oral statement incriminating oneself
  • (b)Compulsion to produce a self-incriminating personal document
  • (c)Compulsion to give a specimen signature or a thumb impression
  • (d)Compulsion to answer an incriminating question put during a criminal trial

  Answer(c) Compulsion to give a specimen signature or a thumb impression. The settled position is that Article 20(3) bars compelling a person to furnish testimony from his own knowledge, whether spoken or written, and so covers both oral and documentary evidence; it does not bar obtaining physical or material evidence from his person, so thumb impressions, specimen signatures and handwriting, blood samples, the production of material objects and the exhibition of the body all fall outside it.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  A government servant is convicted by a criminal court and is thereafter dismissed following a departmental inquiry on the same facts. Which of the following is correct ?

  • (a)The dismissal violates Article 20(2), since he has been punished twice for the same offence
  • (b)Article 20(2) is not attracted, because a departmental inquiry is not a prosecution before a court of law or a judicial tribunal
  • (c)Article 20(3) is attracted, because he was compelled to appear in the departmental inquiry
  • (d)Article 20(1) is attracted, because the departmental penalty is greater than the criminal penalty

  Answer(b) Article 20(2) is not attracted, because a departmental inquiry is not a prosecution before a court of law or a judicial tribunal. The protection against double jeopardy operates only in proceedings of a judicial character; a disciplinary inquiry is an employer's inquiry into the conduct of a servant and is administrative in nature, so it may follow a criminal trial arising out of the same facts without offending Article 20(2).