Under which of the closure motion, only important clauses are taken up for debate and voting and the intervening clauses are skipped over and taken as passed ?

Question

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Correct — option (3), Kangaroo closure. A closure motion is a device by which a member moves that the debate on a matter be cut short and the matter put to vote; if the House approves the motion, discussion stops at once. Parliamentary practice recognises four kinds of closure, and the stem here reproduces the description of one of them almost word for word. Under kangaroo closure only the important clauses of a bill are taken up for debate and for voting, while the clauses in between are skipped over and treated as having been passed. The name is a picture of the procedure: a kangaroo does not walk over the ground between two points, it hops from one to the next, and that is what the Chair does with the clause list — landing on the clauses that matter and passing over the ground between them. The discriminating feature, and the one the examiner is testing, is the basis on which clauses are dropped. Under kangaroo closure the basis is IMPORTANCE, decided in advance: some clauses are judged worth the House's time and the rest are not. That is different from bundling clauses together for a joint vote, and different again from running out of time and sweeping up whatever is left. Because the stem specifies that only important clauses are debated and voted while the intervening ones are skipped and taken as passed, the answer is kangaroo closure and no other.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Under simple closure a member moves that 'the matter having been sufficiently discussed be now put to vote'. It operates on the debate as a whole, not on a clause list: it says the House has heard enough and should now decide. There is no selection of important clauses, nothing is skipped, and no clause is deemed passed without a vote. Simple closure is the plainest and most general of the four devices, and it is the one to fall back on when a question describes a debate being ended in its entirety rather than a bill being worked through clause by clause.  (b) This is the closest relative of the keyed answer and the option most likely to catch a candidate who half-remembers the list. Under closure by compartments, the clauses of a bill or a lengthy resolution are grouped into parts before the debate begins; the House then debates each part as a whole and votes on the whole part together. Notice what does NOT happen: nothing is skipped. Every clause is voted upon — but in bundles rather than one at a time. Kangaroo closure, by contrast, leaves the unimportant clauses out of the debate and the voting altogether and treats them as passed. Grouping is not the same as omitting.  (d) Under guillotine closure the clauses of a bill, or the demands for grants, that have not been discussed are put to vote along with those that have, because the time allotted for the discussion has run out. The trigger is the clock, not the judgment that a clause is unimportant. In the Indian Parliament the guillotine is most familiar from the budget session: on the last of the days allotted for the demands for grants, the Speaker puts all the outstanding demands to the vote whether they have been debated or not. So both kangaroo and guillotine leave clauses undiscussed, but for opposite reasons — kangaroo selects by importance in advance, guillotine sweeps up the remainder when time expires.

Concept: The four closure motions are best learnt as a single set defined against one another. Simple closure ends the debate on a matter as a whole once the House agrees it has been sufficiently discussed. Closure by compartments groups clauses into parts before the debate opens and votes each part as a unit, so everything is voted but nothing individually. Kangaroo closure selects the important clauses for debate and vote and skips the rest, which are taken as passed. Guillotine closure puts undiscussed clauses or demands to the vote together with the discussed ones because the allotted time has expired. All four exist for the same reason — parliamentary time is finite while the legislative programme is not — and all four transfer some control over what gets debated from the floor of the House to those who set the agenda, which is why their use is politically contested as well as procedurally routine.

State PCS 2026 Q71 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2026 Q71 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer