After the extensive discussion in the Constituent Assembly, the following provisions was/were included. Which Article does not include ?
I. Fundamental duties under Art. 51A
II. Constitutional Amendme

Question

After the extensive discussion in the Constituent Assembly, the following provisions was/were included. Which Article does not include ?
I. Fundamental duties under Art. 51A
II. Constitutional Amendment under Art. 368
III. National emergency under Art. 352
IV. Ordinance under Art. 123

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (1), 'Only I correct'. Begin with the stem, because this is a negative question and nothing on the page marks it as one: the words 'does not include' are printed in ordinary type, and they carry the entire item. The stem is also elliptical in the ENGLISH column — the मराठी column prints a complete, determinate sentence, so this is a defect of one column rather than of the question — 'the following provisions was/were included. Which Article does not include ?' breaks off with no object after 'include' — so the sense has to be reconstructed from the four Roman items. What the question is asking is which of the four provisions listed was NOT part of the Constitution that emerged from the Constituent Assembly's debates. Read that way it has a clean answer. Item I is the Fundamental Duties under Article 51A, and these were not in the Constitution the Assembly adopted on 26 November 1949. Part IVA, consisting of the single Article 51A, was inserted by the Constitution (Forty-second Amendment) Act, 1976, on the recommendation of the Swaran Singh Committee appointed by the government during the Emergency, more than a quarter of a century after the Assembly had risen. The Assembly never debated them, because there was nothing to debate: a chapter on the duties of the citizen was not part of the draft before it. The other three items are all provisions of the Constitution as originally adopted, and each of them was argued over at length in the Assembly. Article 368, the amending power, was the subject of a long debate on how rigid the Constitution should be, and Dr Ambedkar defended the mixed scheme that emerged, in which some provisions yield to an ordinary majority, most to a special majority, and the federal provisions only to a special majority plus ratification by the States. Article 352, the proclamation of a national emergency, drew some of the sharpest criticism in the Assembly, members warning that the emergency provisions could convert the federation into a unitary state; Ambedkar answered that the flexibility was a strength rather than a defect. Article 123, the President's power to promulgate ordinances, was attacked as undemocratic and defended as a necessary provision for a situation demanding immediate action when Parliament is not in session. So three of the four provisions came out of the Assembly's debates and one did not, which makes item I the odd one and option (1) the answer.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) 'Only II correct' points at Article 368, the power to amend the Constitution, and that Article was very much part of the Constitution the Constituent Assembly adopted. It sits in Part XX of the original text and was among the more closely argued provisions before the Assembly, precisely because the choice between a rigid and a flexible Constitution was understood to be a choice about how the document would survive its first decades. The scheme settled on was deliberately graded, and it is the one still in force: a special majority of each House for most amendments, with ratification by the legislatures of not less than one-half of the States for the entrenched federal matters listed in the proviso to Article 368(2). What has changed since 1950 is the law around the Article, not its presence — clauses (4) and (5) were added by the 42nd Amendment and struck down in Minerva Mills, and the basic structure doctrine of Kesavananda Bharati limits what the power can reach. None of that bears on whether the Assembly included Article 368, which it plainly did.  (c) 'All of the above are correct' would mean that every one of the four provisions falls outside what the Constituent Assembly's discussions produced, and that is demonstrably untrue for three of them. Articles 368, 352 and 123 all appear in the Constitution as adopted on 26 November 1949 and as brought into force on 26 January 1950, and all three were debated in the Assembly, the emergency provisions and the ordinance power especially warmly. A candidate who reads the stem loosely can end up here by treating the question as asking which items are correct statements about the Constitution — under that misreading all four are indeed genuine constitutional provisions with the Article numbers correctly given, and 'All of the above' looks right. That misreading is exactly what the negative stem is designed to catch. The question is not whether these Articles exist; it is which of them was not part of what the Assembly produced.  (d) 'None of the above are correct' denies that any of the four items is the odd one out, which cannot stand once Article 51A is examined. The Fundamental Duties were introduced by the 42nd Amendment in 1976, a date that by itself settles the question: the Constituent Assembly held its first sitting on 9 December 1946 and adopted the Constitution on 26 November 1949, so a Part inserted in 1976 cannot have come from its discussions. This option is the refuge of a candidate who has found the stem unreadable — and the stem here is genuinely defective, with no object after 'include' and with options (1) and (2) printed as 'Only I correct' and 'Only II correct', without a verb — and who concludes that no answer can be right. A defective stem still has a keyed answer, and the safer course is to reconstruct the question from the items rather than to reject it. Here the items are dated provisions, three from 1949 and one from 1976, which points to a single sensible reading.

Concept: The Fundamental Duties are the clearest example in the Constitution of a Part that the Constituent Assembly never saw. The Constitution as adopted set out Fundamental Rights in Part III and Directive Principles of State Policy in Part IV, rights enforceable in court and principles fundamental to governance but not enforceable, and it said nothing about what a citizen owes in return. Part IVA was inserted by the Constitution (Forty-second Amendment) Act, 1976, on the recommendation of a committee headed by Sardar Swaran Singh, appointed while the Emergency was in force; the idea of enumerating citizens' duties is generally traced in Indian constitutional writing to the Soviet constitution, which was among the few that carried such a chapter. Article 51A originally listed ten duties, including abiding by the Constitution and respecting its ideals, cherishing the ideals of the freedom struggle, upholding the sovereignty and integrity of India, protecting the natural environment, developing the scientific temper and safeguarding public property. An eleventh was added by the Constitution (Eighty-sixth Amendment) Act, 2002, obliging a parent or guardian to provide opportunities for education to a child between six and fourteen years — the same amendment that inserted Article 21A. Like the Directive Principles, the duties are not directly enforceable; unlike them, they address the citizen rather than the State.

State PCS 2023 Q85 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q85 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer