Who among the following is not directly participating in the election of President ?
(a) The elected members of Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha.
(b) The elected members of Legislative Assemblies of the Stat

Question

Who among the following is not directly participating in the election of President ?
(a) The elected members of Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha.
(b) The elected members of Legislative Assemblies of the State.
(c) The elected members of Legislative Assemblies of the union territories of Delhi and Puducherry.
(d) Both elected and nominated members of the state legislative councils.

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Correct — option (3), which names statement (d) alone. Before anything else, read the stem again. It asks who is NOT directly participating in the election of the President, so the task is to find the entry in the list that has no vote, and every statement describing someone who does vote is to be rejected. This paper carries seven negative or exclusionary stems and sets the negation in bold in six of them in the English column — but not in this one. The word 'not' here is in ordinary type, and so is 'नाही' in the Marathi column, which bolds only five, having left Q57 unmarked as well, while the question immediately before it has its key word 'correct' set in bold. A candidate who has spent thirty questions being warned by the typography gets no warning at all at the one place in the paper where the inversion is most expensive, so this stem has to be read rather than glanced at. Now the law. Article 54 states that the President is elected by an electoral college consisting of the elected members of both Houses of Parliament and the elected members of the Legislative Assemblies of the States. An Explanation added by the Constitution (Seventieth Amendment) Act, 1992 extends the expression 'State' for this purpose to include the National Capital Territory of Delhi and the Union territory of Puducherry, so the elected members of those two Assemblies vote as well. That accounts for the first three statements: elected members of the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha do vote, elected members of the State Legislative Assemblies do vote, and elected members of the Delhi and Puducherry Assemblies do vote. Statement (d) is the odd one out, and it is excluded twice over. First, the Constitution's list speaks only of Legislative Assemblies, so no member of a State Legislative Council has any part in the election of the President, whether that member was elected or nominated — the upper chamber of a State legislature is left out of the electoral college entirely. Second, the article says 'elected members' throughout, so nominated members are excluded everywhere: the twelve members nominated to the Rajya Sabha do not vote, and neither do nominated members of any Assembly. Statement (d) manages to combine both disqualifications in one line by naming the elected and the nominated members of the Councils together. The reason for the design is worth knowing. The President is the head of the whole federal structure, and the electoral college is built so that the value of the votes of the States taken together equals the value of the votes of the two Houses of Parliament, with each State weighted by its population. Members who were nominated rather than elected are left out because the college is meant to reflect the choice of the electorate, and Legislative Councils are left out because they are not directly elected bodies and only some States have one. The keyed option is therefore the one naming statement (d) by itself.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This names statements (a) and (b), and both of them describe voters rather than non-voters. Article 54 puts the elected members of both Houses of Parliament and the elected members of the Legislative Assemblies of the States at the very centre of the electoral college — they are the two limbs the article expressly lists. Note what the word 'elected' is doing in statement (a): it is the reason the statement is accurate. The twelve members nominated to the Rajya Sabha by the President, and the members formerly nominated to the Lok Sabha under the Anglo-Indian provision that the 104th Amendment Act discontinued, have never had a vote in a presidential election. An option that pairs two undoubted voters is a trap for the candidate who has read the stem as though it asked who does participate, which on a negative question of this kind is the single commonest way of losing the mark.  (b) This names statements (b) and (c), the elected members of the State Legislative Assemblies and the elected members of the Assemblies of Delhi and Puducherry, and both of them vote. The second of the two is the more interesting, and it is where a well-prepared candidate can talk himself into an error. Union territories are, as a rule, outside the presidential electoral college, and for most of them that remains true. But the Constitution (Seventieth Amendment) Act, 1992 added an Explanation to Article 54 bringing the National Capital Territory of Delhi and the Union territory of Puducherry within the expression 'State' for this purpose, precisely because both have elected Legislative Assemblies of their own. A candidate who remembers the general rule about Union territories but not the amendment will read statement (c) as describing non-voters and may land here.  (d) This names statements (a) and (c) — the elected members of the two Houses of Parliament and the elected members of the Delhi and Puducherry Assemblies — and once again both describe participants rather than the excluded. The option is really a variation on the previous one, built from the same misreading of the position of Delhi and Puducherry, and it is worth using to fix the whole map in place. Those who vote for the President are the elected members of the Lok Sabha, the elected members of the Rajya Sabha, the elected members of every State Legislative Assembly, and the elected members of the Assemblies of Delhi and Puducherry. Those who do not are the nominated members of either House, the nominated members of any Assembly, and every member of every State Legislative Council. Set the list out that way and no rearrangement of the four statements can catch a candidate.

Concept: The President of India is elected indirectly, by an electoral college defined in Article 54, and by a method defined in Article 55. The college consists of the elected members of both Houses of Parliament and the elected members of the Legislative Assemblies of the States, and since the Constitution (Seventieth Amendment) Act, 1992 it includes the elected members of the Legislative Assemblies of the National Capital Territory of Delhi and the Union territory of Puducherry. Nominated members are excluded throughout, and members of State Legislative Councils have no part in the election at all. Article 55 requires as far as practicable uniformity in the scale of representation of the different States and parity between the States as a whole and the Union: the value of a Member of the Legislative Assembly's vote is obtained by dividing the population of the State by the total number of elected members of that Assembly and then dividing by one thousand, while the value of a Member of Parliament's vote is the total value of all the Assembly votes divided by the total number of elected members of both Houses. The population used for this purpose is that of the 1971 census, frozen there by the Constitution (Eighty-fourth Amendment) Act, 2001 until the figures of the first census taken after the year 2026 are published. The election is held by proportional representation by means of the single transferable vote, and the voting is by secret ballot; a candidate must secure a quota of more than half the total value of the votes polled, second preferences being transferred if no one reaches it on the first count. Disputes about the election are decided by the Supreme Court under Article 71, and an election cannot be called in question on the ground that the electoral college was incomplete because of a vacancy.

State PCS 2021 Q73 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2021 Q73 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer