Given below are two statements, one is labelled as Assertion (A) and the other as Reason (R).
Assertion (A) : Public Interest Litigation in India is essential for the rule of law.
Reason (R) : Public

Question

Given below are two statements, one is labelled as Assertion (A) and the other as Reason (R).
Assertion (A) : Public Interest Litigation in India is essential for the rule of law.
Reason (R) : Public Interest Litigation provides effective access of Justice to socially and economically weaker sections.
Select the correct answer from the code given below :
Code :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — D, both (A) and (R) are true and (R) is the correct explanation of (A). Take the code first, because this booklet has inverted it. On an ordinary UPSC paper (a) is the 'both true and R explains A' slot and (d) is the '(A) false, (R) true' slot. Here the two have changed places: (d) carries the full agreement, (a) carries 'both true but R does not explain A'. Read the printed words, not the remembered position. Now the substance. The Assertion is true. The rule of law means, at minimum, that the law binds the state as much as the citizen and that every person can call the state to account before a court; on paper India guarantees this through Article 14 and through the right to constitutional remedies in Article 32, which Ambedkar called the very soul of the Constitution. But a remedy that exists only on paper is not the rule of law. Until the early 1980s the doctrine of locus standi meant that only the person whose own right was injured could move the court — which in practice shut out the prisoner who did not know he was entitled to bail, the bonded labourer who could not leave the quarry, and the pavement dweller who could not afford a lawyer. Public Interest Litigation dismantled that barrier: in S. P. Gupta v. Union of India (1981) the Supreme Court held that any member of the public acting bona fide may move the court on behalf of someone unable to do so by reason of poverty or disability or a socially or economically disadvantaged position, and through its epistolary jurisdiction it began treating letters and postcards as writ petitions. The Reason is therefore true as well. And the Reason is not merely a second true fact standing alongside the first — it is the operative reason the first is true. PIL matters to the rule of law precisely because it converts a formal guarantee into an effective one for those who could not otherwise reach a court. Remove the access described in R and the claim in A collapses. Both true, R explains A, and on this paper that is option (d).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This is the option a well-prepared candidate is most likely to mark by accident, because on a normal UPSC paper this text sits at (d) and the full-agreement text sits at (a) — the booklet has swapped them. On the merits it also fails. Both statements are true, so the option gets that far, but the explanatory link is real and direct. Access to justice for those who cannot otherwise obtain it is not an incidental benefit of PIL that happens to sit beside its constitutional value; it is the whole mechanism by which PIL serves the rule of law. Apply the deletion test: strike out the access described in R and there is nothing left to support the claim in A.  (b) The Reason is not false. It is the documented history of the jurisdiction. Hussainara Khatoon v. State of Bihar (1979) reached the Supreme Court on behalf of undertrial prisoners who had been in jail longer than the maximum sentence for the offence they were charged with, and produced the ruling that a speedy trial is part of the right to life and personal liberty under Article 21. Bandhua Mukti Morcha v. Union of India (1984) began as a letter about bonded labourers in the stone quarries of Faridabad. Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan (1997) produced binding guidelines against sexual harassment at the workplace. In each case the petitioner was not the injured person, and in each case the beneficiaries were people with no realistic route to a court of their own.  (c) The Assertion is not false either. It is a fair statement of the settled constitutional position that the rule of law requires an effective, not merely a declared, remedy — which is why Article 32 is itself a Fundamental Right and why Article 39A directs the State to secure equal justice and free legal aid. Candidates sometimes reject the Assertion because they have read the criticism that PIL invites judicial overreach and gets misused for publicity, a concern the Supreme Court itself addressed in State of Uttaranchal v. Balwant Singh Chaufal (2010) by laying down guidelines to screen out frivolous petitions. But that is an argument about how PIL should be disciplined, not a denial that it is essential; the Court framed those guidelines expressly to protect the credibility of the jurisdiction, not to dismantle it.

Concept: Public Interest Litigation is not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution. It is a judicial innovation of the late 1970s and early 1980s, built on the writ jurisdiction of the Supreme Court under Article 32 and of the High Courts under Article 226, and associated above all with Justices P. N. Bhagwati and V. R. Krishna Iyer. Its central move was to relax the traditional rule of locus standi, under which only the person whose own legal right had been violated could approach a court. Once any public-spirited person could petition on behalf of a class unable to petition for itself, and once the Court was willing to treat a letter as a writ petition, the constitutional remedy became reachable by people for whom it had previously been theoretical. That is why PIL is discussed as an instrument of the rule of law rather than merely as a procedural convenience.

State PCS 2025 Q137 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q137 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer