What is the position of representation of Anglo-Indian Community in Lok Sabha ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, Nomination of them has been done away with by 104th Constitutional Amendment. The point that makes this question worth studying is that Article 331 was never repealed. It still stands in the Constitution word for word: 'Notwithstanding anything in article 81, the President may, if he is of opinion that the Anglo-Indian community is not adequately represented in the House of the People, nominate not more than two members of that community to the House of the People.' What ended the practice is the expiry clock in Article 334, which sets a single outer time limit on two separate things — reservation of seats for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, and representation of the Anglo-Indian community by nomination. That limit began at ten years and Parliament extended it again and again: to twenty (8th Amendment, 1959), thirty (23rd, 1969), forty (45th, 1980), fifty (62nd, 1989), sixty (79th, 1999) and seventy (95th, 2009, with effect from 25 January 2010). The Constitution (One Hundred and Fourth Amendment) Act, 2019 broke the pair for the first time. It raised the limit for the SC/ST clause alone from seventy years to eighty and left the Anglo-Indian clause standing at seventy. Seventy years from the commencement of the Constitution on 26 January 1950 ran out on 25 January 2020 — the very day the 104th Amendment itself came into force, after receiving assent on 21 January 2020. From that date the President's power under Article 331 became spent while SC/ST reservation carried on to 2030. Option (b) states exactly that position, and on the date of this paper, 13 December 2024, it had been the law for nearly five years.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This is what Article 331 says on its face, and it was the right answer to this question on any day before 25 January 2020 — which is precisely why it is the trap. The text survives; the power does not, because Article 334 set a time limit on it and the 104th Amendment declined to extend that limit. Anyone who learned the Lok Sabha's maximum strength as 530 plus 20 plus 2 nominated members, i.e. 552, is carrying the pre-2020 arithmetic.  (c) The number one is real, but it belongs to a different House and a different authority. Article 333 allows the Governor of a State — not the President — to nominate one member of the Anglo-Indian community to that State's Legislative Assembly, reduced from an open number to exactly one by the 23rd Amendment in 1969. The option lifts the State figure and drops it into the Lok Sabha. That State provision, in any case, expired on 25 January 2020 alongside the Union one, because Article 334 covers both.  (d) Never true, at any point in the Constitution's history. Article 331 turns entirely on the President's subjective opinion that the community is 'not adequately represented', with a hard ceiling of two, and mentions population nowhere. Proportionality to population belongs to a different device — reservation of seats for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes under Article 330, which is worked out in proportion to the community's share of the State's population. Mixing the two is the standard confusion this option is built on.

Concept: The Constitution gives two different kinds of protection to two different kinds of group, and the Anglo-Indian provisions exist because the community fits neither of the usual moulds. Article 366(2) defines an Anglo-Indian as 'a person whose father or any of whose other male progenitors in the male line is or was of European descent but who is domiciled within the territory of India and is or was born within such territory of parents habitually resident therein' — the only community the Constitution defines by descent. Being scattered across the country rather than concentrated in any district, it could not be helped by reserving a territorial constituency, which is what Articles 330 and 332 do for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. So the framers used nomination instead: up to two seats in the Lok Sabha under Article 331 and one in each State Assembly under Article 333. They paired it with two other transitional protections that tapered on their own — Article 336 kept the community's existing share of railway, customs, postal and telegraph posts but cut it by ten per cent every two years until it ceased after ten years, and Article 337 did the same for educational grants over three-year steps. Every one of these was built to end.

State PCS 2024 Q5 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q5 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer