From which country, the Indian Constitution has taken reference for the idea of the Fundamental Rights?

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Correct — B, United States of America. Part III of our Constitution is modelled on the United States Bill of Rights — the first ten amendments to the American Constitution, proposed by the First Congress on 25 September 1789 and ratified on 15 December 1791 (US National Archives). What was borrowed is not a list of nice sentiments; it is a specific constitutional device: a written catalogue of rights placed above ordinary legislation, and a court empowered to strike down a law that violates it. Article 13(2) carries exactly that device — 'The State shall not make any law which takes away or abridges the rights conferred by this Part and any law made in contravention of this clause shall, to the extent of the contravention, be void.' The textual echoes are close enough to trace one by one. Article 20(3), 'No person accused of any offence shall be compelled to be a witness against himself', is the American Fifth Amendment privilege; the Supreme Court itself noted in Kesavananda Bharati that this privilege 'is recognized by our Constitution as a fundamental right'. Article 14's second limb, 'the equal protection of the laws', is the phrase of the US Fourteenth Amendment of 1868. Article 20(2) is the double-jeopardy bar. The strongest proof that the drafters worked from the American model is where they edited it: they began with 'without due process of law', and after B.N. Rau's discussion in America with Justice Frankfurter — who thought judicial review under that clause undemocratic and an unfair burden on judges — the Drafting Committee substituted 'except according to procedure established by law' in Article 21, a phrase taken from Article 31 of Japan's Constitution. You only rewrite the draft you started from.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Ireland is the sharpest trap on the paper because its contribution sits in the very next Part of the same Constitution. The Irish Constitution of 1937 supplied the Directive Principles of State Policy, Part IV, Articles 36 to 51. Article 37 tells you they are the opposite of a Fundamental Right: 'The provisions contained in this Part shall not be enforceable by any court, but the principles therein laid down are nevertheless fundamental in the governance of the country.' Non-justiciable directions to the State are not rights.  (c) Britain gave us a great deal — the parliamentary executive, single citizenship, the rule of law, and the five prerogative writs named by their English titles in Article 32(2): habeas corpus, mandamus, prohibition, quo warranto and certiorari. But Britain could not supply the idea itself. It has no single written constitution and its Parliament is legally sovereign, so no British court can void an Act of Parliament for violating a fundamental right. India's writs are English; the entrenched right they enforce is not.  (d) Canada supplied the structural, not the rights, half of the borrowing list: a federation described as a Union of States rather than a compact of states, with a strong Centre, residuary legislative power vested in the Union, Governors appointed by the Centre, and the advisory jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. Note the chronology too — Canada's own Charter of Rights and Freedoms arrived only in 1982, more than three decades after our Part III was written.

Concept: The framers wrote very little of the Indian Constitution from nothing. Roughly two-thirds of its text descends from the Government of India Act, 1935, and the remainder draws consciously on constitutions the Constituent Assembly studied — a practice Dr B. R. Ambedkar defended on the ground that after a century of constitution-making worldwide there was nothing shameful in learning from experience. The conventional 'borrowed features' table therefore credits the USA with the Fundamental Rights, judicial review, the independence of the judiciary and the impeachment of the President; Ireland with the Directive Principles; Britain with the parliamentary system and the writs; Canada with a strong-Centre federation; Australia with the Concurrent List; Japan with 'procedure established by law'; and the USSR with the Fundamental Duties added in 1976. Part III itself runs from Article 12 to Article 35, groups the rights under six heads after the right to property was moved out in 1978, and is made real by two enforcement articles — Article 32 in the Supreme Court and Article 226 in the High Courts.

State PCS 2023 Q104 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q104 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer