Which fundamental duty applies to you when you see your college friends start fighting with the canteen person when he passed a few anti-religious statements?
- (a)To value and preserve the rich heritage
- (b)To promote harmony and spirit of brotherhood
- (c)To protect and improve our natural environment
- (d)To develop the scientific temper, humanism, and the spirit of inquiry
Answer
Why
Correct — B. The trigger in the stem is the anti-religious remark — the quarrel is about religion, not about property, heritage or the environment.
Article 51A(e) asks every citizen to promote harmony and the spirit of common brotherhood among all the people of India, transcending religious, linguistic and regional or sectional diversities.
Stepping in to cool a religiously charged fight is that duty in practice — option (b).
Why the others are wrong
- (a)To value and preserve the rich heritage — Article 51A(f) covers valuing and preserving the rich heritage of our composite culture — monuments, languages, traditions. A canteen quarrel over religious remarks is a harmony problem, not a heritage one.
- (c)To protect and improve our natural environment — Article 51A(g) is the environmental duty: protect and improve the natural environment including forests, lakes, rivers and wildlife, and have compassion for living creatures. Nothing in the stem involves any of that.
- (d)To develop the scientific temper, humanism, and the spirit of inquiry — Article 51A(h) asks you to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform. It is aimed at superstition and unreason, not at defusing a communal argument on the spot.
Concept
Fundamental Duties sit in Part IVA of the Constitution, all under Article 51A. They were inserted by the 42nd Amendment, 1976, on the recommendation of the Swaran Singh Committee.
Ten were added then. The 86th Amendment, 2002 added the eleventh — a parent's or guardian's duty to provide education to a child between six and fourteen.
The duties are not enforceable in a court by themselves, so this item asks you to classify rather than apply them: a small scene is printed and you match it to the clause that names the same subject.
The stem is deliberately loose, and a real incident could touch more than one clause. Read the phrase the paper plants — here, 'anti-religious statements' — and match it to the duty whose wording covers that same word.
Key facts
- Fundamental Duties are contained in Part IVA of the Constitution, all under Article 51A.
- The 42nd Amendment Act, 1976 inserted ten Fundamental Duties, following the Swaran Singh Committee's recommendation.
- The 86th Amendment Act, 2002 added the eleventh duty, on a parent providing education to a child aged six to fourteen.
- Article 51A(e) is the harmony and common brotherhood clause, and it also asks citizens to renounce practices derogatory to the dignity of women.
Study next
Common traps
- Option (a) feels close because heritage and harmony both sound cultural, but 51A(f) is about preserving composite culture, not about calming a fight.
- Treating a Fundamental Duty as directly enforceable against a citizen. Article 51A carries no penalty of its own.
- Matching on the setting (college, canteen) instead of on the phrase that names the subject of the duty.
Other scene-to-clause matches ask for either the wording or the letter.
The wording version appears at 17 Sep 2024, 16:00, GA Q1 (students writing their names on the walls of Humayun's tomb — safeguard public property) and at 12 Sep 2024, 09:00, GA Q16 (a student composting — protect and improve the natural environment).
The lettered version appears at 13 Sep 2024, 12:30, GA Q21 (a worker taking his eight-year-old son to the site — Article 51A(k)) and at 23 Sep 2024, 12:30, GA Q6 (the national flag used as a desk covering — Article 51A(a)).
Related PYQs
No directly related past PYQ was found.