Maharashtra Legislative Council completed its 50 years of existence in _________.

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (3), 1987. The count runs from 1937. Bombay Province did not have two chambers until the Government of India Act, 1935 came into operation for the provinces on 1 April 1937; that Act gave several provinces, Bombay among them, a bicameral legislature, and from then the Bombay Legislative Council sat as the upper house alongside the Bombay Legislative Assembly. The House dates its own institutional life from that moment: the first chairman of the Council in its new character, Mangaldas Pakvasa, took office on 22 July 1937, and the list of chairmen of what is today the Maharashtra Legislative Council begins there and runs unbroken to the present holder. Fifty years from 1937 is 1987, and the golden jubilee was marked on exactly that reckoning — a commemorative volume covering the period, 'Fifty Years of Legislative Council in Maharashtra 1937-87', survives in library catalogues under that title. What changed in 1960 was the name and the territory, not the House. When the bilingual State of Bombay was divided on 1 May 1960 and Maharashtra was formed, the same upper chamber continued as the Maharashtra Legislative Council, and Vitthal Sakharam Page became its first chairman under that name on 11 July 1960. Because the House is a continuous body — it is never dissolved, and one-third of its members retire every second year — there is no re-founding event in 1960 to start a new count from, which is precisely why the fiftieth year falls in 1987 and not in 2010. One honest complication is worth knowing rather than being surprised by: the Legislature has since commemorated a CENTENARY of the Council, at a function in Mumbai on 3 September 2024 attended by the President of India, on a longer reckoning of the House's ancestry that reaches back past 1937. The fifty-year count this question is built on is the 1937 one, and on that count the answer is 1987.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) 1990 would require the Council to have begun in 1940, and nothing in the history of the House starts there. The Government of India Act, 1935 came into operation for the provinces in April 1937; the Congress ministries formed under it in Bombay and elsewhere in 1937 resigned in 1939 over the declaration of war on India's behalf, and the provincial legislatures were suspended for much of what followed — a period of interruption, not of foundation. The option works only on a candidate who has a vague sense that the Council is 'about fifty years older than the present day' and picks a round number near the end of the twentieth century. The way to defeat it is to fix the start date rather than the anniversary: 1937 for bicameralism in Bombay, 1960 for the renaming, and arithmetic does the rest.  (b) This is the dangerous option, because it is the golden jubilee of something real. Maharashtra itself was formed on 1 May 1960 and celebrated fifty years of statehood on 1 May 2010, and the Legislative Council took its present name on that same 1960 date. A candidate who reasons 'the MAHARASHTRA Legislative Council cannot be older than Maharashtra' reaches 2010 by a chain of thought that is entirely rational and still wrong, because the House was not created in 1960 — it was renamed. The upper chamber that sat in Bombay from 1937 continued sitting, without dissolution, through the reorganisation; only its territory and its title changed. Remember the distinction as a rule: 1960 is the birthday of the STATE, 1937 the birthday of the CHAMBER, and an anniversary question must be answered from whichever of the two the stem names.  (d) 2000 counts fifty years from 1950 and assumes that India's legislatures all begin with the Constitution. They do not. The Constitution that commenced on 26 January 1950 found a Legislative Council already sitting in Bombay under the 1935 Act and carried it forward rather than creating it; Article 168 simply provides that in the States it names there shall be a Legislative Council as well as a Legislative Assembly, and Article 169 gives Parliament the power to create or abolish one when the Assembly of the State passes a resolution to that effect by the special majority prescribed. So 1950 is a change of constitutional foundation for a House that already existed, not a starting point for its age. The same reasoning defeats any 'fifty years from Independence' variant of this question.

Concept: A State Legislative Council is optional, and India has very few of them. Article 168 provides for a Legislative Assembly in every State and a Legislative Council in some; Article 169 allows Parliament to create or abolish a Council for a State, but only after the Legislative Assembly of that State has passed a resolution by a majority of the total membership of the Assembly and by a majority of not less than two-thirds of the members present and voting — and such a law is expressly not to be deemed a constitutional amendment for the purposes of Article 368. Article 171 governs the composition: the total strength of a Council may not exceed one-third of the strength of the Assembly of that State and may not be less than forty. Its membership is put together by an unusual mixture of methods — roughly one-third elected by electorates of members of local authorities, one-third by members of the Legislative Assembly, one-twelfth by graduates of three years' standing, one-twelfth by teachers of at least secondary standing, and the remainder nominated by the Governor from persons having special knowledge or practical experience in literature, science, art, the co-operative movement and social service. The Maharashtra Legislative Council has 78 seats on that pattern, 66 filled by election and 12 by nomination. Crucially for this question, a Council is a continuous House: it is not subject to dissolution, and one-third of its members retire every second year, each member serving six years. Six States were bicameral at the time this paper was written — Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Telangana and Uttar Pradesh — the Jammu and Kashmir Council having been abolished by the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act, 2019.

State PCS 2021 Q82 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2021 Q82 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer