Which of the following Directive Principles do not follow Gandhian Principles?
1) Organization of Village Panchayats
2) Common Civil Code
3) Promotion of cottage Industry in rural areas
4) Right to wo

Question

Which of the following Directive Principles do not follow Gandhian Principles?
1) Organization of Village Panchayats
2) Common Civil Code
3) Promotion of cottage Industry in rural areas
4) Right to work

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, 2 and 4. Begin with a caveat that the question itself does not state, because it decides how you should revise this topic. The Constitution nowhere divides the Directive Principles into Socialistic, Gandhian and Liberal-intellectual groups. Part IV simply runs from Article 36 to Article 51 as one undivided list. The three-fold grouping is a taxonomy from standard Indian polity textbooks — it is a teaching device for organising sixteen articles, not a constitutional label — and BPSC, like UPSC before it, examines the textbook grouping. Within that grouping the four items sort cleanly. Statement 1, organisation of village panchayats, is Article 40: 'The State shall take steps to organise village panchayats and endow them with such powers and authority as may be necessary to enable them to function as units of self-government.' Gram swaraj is the Gandhian idea in its purest constitutional form, so statement 1 does follow Gandhian principles. Statement 3, promotion of cottage industry in rural areas, is the closing limb of Article 43, which after directing a living wage adds that the State 'shall endeavour to promote cottage industries on an individual or co-operative basis in rural areas' — khadi, village industry and decentralised production, again unmistakably Gandhian. That leaves the two the Commission identified. Statement 2, a common civil code, is Article 44: 'The State shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India.' It descends from the liberal, rationalist tradition of a single secular law for all citizens, and the textbooks place it in the liberal-intellectual group alongside Articles 45, 48, 48A, 49, 50 and 51. Statement 4, the right to work, is Article 41, under which the State shall, within the limits of its economic capacity and development, make effective provision for securing the right to work, to education and to public assistance in cases of unemployment, old age, sickness and disablement — a welfare-state guarantee that the textbooks group with the socialistic principles, with Articles 38, 39, 39A, 42 and 43A. Neither the uniform civil code nor a state-guaranteed right to work belongs to the Gandhian programme of village self-rule and decentralised cottage production, and the Commission's own published remark of 31 October 2025 says exactly that: statements 2 and 4 are not related to Gandhian principles. Hence option (c).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Right about the common civil code, wrong about village panchayats. Article 40 is the most quoted Gandhian Directive Principle of all — panchayati raj is Gandhi's gram swaraj written into Part IV, and it is the article the 73rd Amendment of 1992 later built Part IX upon. Picking this option means calling the very principle that produced India's village republics non-Gandhian.  (b) The half-right answer, and the one this item is designed to catch. A candidate correctly spots that the uniform civil code is liberal rather than Gandhian, then stops, treating 'right to work' as a broadly Gandhian aspiration because Gandhi valued labour and self-reliance. But Article 41's right to work is a claim on the State for employment and public assistance — a socialistic welfare guarantee, not a call for decentralised village production.  (d) The exact inversion of the truth: statements 1 and 3 are Articles 40 and 43, the two items on the list that are unambiguously Gandhian. This option catches candidates who misread the negative in the stem — the question asks which principles do NOT follow Gandhian principles, and 'do not' is easy to lose in a hurried reading.

Concept: The Directive Principles occupy Part IV of the Constitution, Articles 36 to 51, borrowed in form from the Irish Constitution of 1937 and in spirit from the Instrument of Instructions in the Government of India Act, 1935. Article 37 fixes their status precisely: they 'shall not be enforceable by any court', yet the principles laid down 'are nevertheless fundamental in the governance of the country' and it is the duty of the State to apply them in making laws. Because Part IV is not internally organised, textbook writers group its articles by the political philosophy each expresses, and that grouping — socialistic, Gandhian, liberal-intellectual — is what examiners test. The socialistic set is about the welfare state and distributive justice: Articles 38, 39, 39A, 41, 42, 43 and 43A. The Gandhian set is about decentralisation and rural reconstruction: Article 40 on village panchayats, Article 43 on cottage industries, Article 43B on co-operative societies, Article 46 on the educational and economic interests of Scheduled Castes and Tribes, Article 47 on prohibition of intoxicating drinks and drugs, and Article 48 on the prohibition of cow slaughter. The liberal-intellectual set covers Articles 44, 45, 48, 48A, 49, 50 and 51. Because the scheme sorts ideas and not articles, a single article can appear in two groups — Article 43 is quoted as socialistic for its living wage and as Gandhian for cottage industries, and Article 47 as socialistic for nutrition and public health and as Gandhian for prohibition. That overlap is itself the proof that these are teaching labels rather than a constitutional scheme.

State PCS 2025 Q59 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q59 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer