Sikkim became a full-fledged State of the Union of India in

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Correct — B, 1975. Sikkim was admitted as a State by the Constitution (Thirty-sixth Amendment) Act, 1975, and every date that Act fixes for itself falls in that year. The stem's own phrase comes from the Act's Statement of Objects and Reasons, signed by Y. B. Chavan on 19 April 1975: 'it is proposed to include Sikkim as a full-fledged State in the First Schedule to the Constitution and to allot to Sikkim one seat in the Council of States and one seat in the House of the People.' The four operative sections did exactly that. Section 2 inserted, after entry 21 of the First Schedule, the entry '22. Sikkim — The territories which immediately before the commencement of the Constitution (Thirty-sixth Amendment) Act, 1975, were comprised in Sikkim' — which is why Sikkim is always called India's 22nd State. Section 3 inserted Article 371F, the article of special provisions that still governs Sikkim. Section 4 amended the Fourth Schedule to allot Sikkim one seat in the Council of States and substituted the figure 232 for 231 in the total. Section 5 made the consequential deletions: Article 2A was omitted, the Tenth Schedule of that day was omitted, and the cross-references to its paragraph 4 were struck out of Articles 80(1) and 81(1). The footnotes printed in the official text of the Constitution date all of these w.e.f. 26 April 1975, because section 1(2) provides that the Act 'shall be deemed to have come into force on the date on which the Bill for this Act ... as passed by the House of the People, is passed by the Council of States'. The Act itself is then dated '[16th May, 1975]', the day of the President's assent. Commencement running ahead of assent is deliberate, not a printing error: Article 371F(p) was written to validate 'all things done and all actions taken in or in relation to the State of Sikkim ... during the period commencing on the appointed day and ending immediately before the date on which the Constitution (Thirty-sixth Amendment) Act, 1975, receives the assent of the President.' So the Constitution names two candidate moments for Sikkim's statehood, 26 April 1975 and 16 May 1975, and both of them are in 1975.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The year of the machinery that stopped one step short of statehood, which is what makes it the designed trap. Sikkim's Assembly was elected in April 1974; the Chogyal promulgated the Government of Sikkim Act, 1974 on 4 July 1974; and Parliament passed the Constitution (Thirty-fifth Amendment) Act, 1974 to give effect to it. But that amendment inserted Article 2A, headed 'Sikkim to be associated with the Union', and a Tenth Schedule headed 'Terms and Conditions of Association of Sikkim with the Union' — association, not membership. Sikkim got a seat in each House and a promise of Indian responsibility for its defence and external relations, and remained outside the First Schedule. Even that Act is dated 22 February 1975 and was brought into force on 1 March 1975, so 1974 is not the year anything constitutional actually changed.  (c) Nothing in 1976 altered Sikkim's status, because by then it had been a State for months. What did happen is the sort of tidying that follows admission and can be mistaken for it: Parliament passed the Election Laws (Extension to Sikkim) Act, 1976 (Act 10 of 1976, dated 25 January 1976) to extend the Representation of the People Acts of 1950 and 1951 to the State of Sikkim and to fix its Assembly at 32 directly elected seats. That Act repealed an Ordinance of 1975 and was itself deemed to have come into force on 9 September 1975 — it is dated after statehood and back-dated into the year of statehood, which is the opposite of what this option claims.  (d) This can only be right if 1975 is wrong, and 1975 is written into the short title of the very Act that made Sikkim a State. On a paper where option (d) is 'None of the above' this often, treat it as a claim that has to be disproved rather than a safe place to park a doubt: here it would require the Constitution (Thirty-sixth Amendment) Act, 1975 to have been passed in some other year.

Concept: A territory becomes a State of the Indian Union only when Parliament puts its name into the First Schedule, which is the constitutional list of the States and their territories. Article 2 lets Parliament 'admit into the Union, or establish, new States on such terms and conditions as it thinks fit'; Article 3 covers the rearranging of States that already exist. Sikkim was an admission under Article 2, and it came in two stages rather than one. Sikkim had been a protectorate outside India, with the Chogyal as ruler; the Agreement of 8 May 1973 between the Chogyal, the leaders of Sikkim's political parties and the Government of India began the move to responsible government, and the Government of Sikkim Act, 1974 followed. The Constitution (Thirty-fifth Amendment) Act, 1974 then created a category the Constitution has never used again — the 'associate' state under Article 2A, with its terms set out in a Tenth Schedule. Association lasted under two months of operation. After the Sikkim Assembly's resolution of 10 April 1975 and the opinion poll of 14 April 1975, the Constitution (Thirty-sixth Amendment) Act, 1975 deleted the associate category outright and admitted Sikkim as a full State, adding Article 371F to carry over its assembly, its courts, its laws and its treaties into the new constitutional order.

State PCS 2023 Q58 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q58 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer