Indian Polity GK Questions with Answers – Page 21

Article 172(1) provides that every legislative assembly of a state shall continue for five years from the date appointed for its first meeting and no longer, with the same Emergency proviso that applies to the Lok Sabha, so an assembly term can be extended by one year at a time…

The proviso to Article 83(2) allows Parliament to extend the term of the Lok Sabha by law for a period not exceeding one year at a time while a Proclamation of Emergency is in operation, and the extension cannot in any case continue beyond a period of six months after…

The committee proposed a synchronisation in two steps: first the Lok Sabha and all the state legislative assemblies would go to the polls together, and then elections to the local bodies, that is the panchayats and the municipalities, would be held within a hundred days of that poll.

The Constitution (One Hundred and Twenty-ninth Amendment) Bill, 2024, introduced in the Lok Sabha on 17 December 2024, proposes a new Article 82A under which the President notifies an appointed date on the first sitting of the Lok Sabha after a general election, and the term of every assembly constituted…

The Law Commission of India, in its 170th Report on Reform of the Electoral Laws in 1999, recommended that there should be one single election for the Lok Sabha and all the legislative assemblies once in five years, and the Commission returned to the subject in a draft report in…

The High Level Committee on Simultaneous Elections was constituted on 2 September 2023 under the chairmanship of former President Ram Nath Kovind and submitted its report on 14 March 2024, recommending a two-step synchronisation of elections and a single electoral roll.

The first four general elections, in 1951-52, 1957, 1962 and 1967, were held simultaneously for Parliament and the state assemblies, and 1967 was the last of them.

Article 83(2) provides that the House of the People shall continue for five years from the date appointed for its first meeting and no longer, and that the expiration of that period operates as a dissolution of the House; it also allows Parliament to extend the term by up to…

The reservation of seats for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes under Articles 330 and 332 has a time limit set by Article 334, and that limit has been extended by amendment every ten years.

It reserves seats in every panchayat for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes in proportion to their population, and reserves not less than one-third of the total number of seats, and not less than one-third of the offices of chairperson, for women, the women's share being counted within the…

Article 334A was drafted in this way because one-third of the seats cannot be set apart until it is known which constituencies exist and how large they are, and the reserved seats are meant to rotate after each later delimitation.

Each was set up under a Delimitation Commission Act passed by Parliament for the purpose, and each worked on the latest available census: the commission of 2002 used the 2001 census after the 87th Amendment made that census the basis.

The Delimitation Commission Act gives its published orders this finality so that a general election is not held up by litigation over constituency boundaries, and the Supreme Court has upheld the bar.

Such a seat is not a separate electorate: all voters of the constituency vote, but only a candidate of the reserved community may contest.

Article 330A reserves one-third of the seats in the Lok Sabha for women, Article 332A does the same for the legislative assembly of every state, and Article 334A fixes when the reservation begins and how long it lasts, tying it to the first census after the commencement of the Act…

The correct answer is B, a serving or retired judge of the Supreme Court, who is appointed chairperson of the Commission.

The 42nd Amendment had frozen the allocation on the 1971 census only until the census after 2000; as that date approached, the 84th Amendment pushed the freeze forward to the first census taken after 2026, so that states which had controlled population growth would not lose seats.

The amendment inserted Article 330A for the Lok Sabha and Article 332A for the state assemblies, and amended Article 239AA so that the reservation also covers the Delhi assembly.

Article 82 says that upon the completion of each census the allocation of seats in the Lok Sabha to the states and the division of each state into territorial constituencies shall be readjusted by such authority and in such manner as Parliament may by law determine.

A quasi-federal constitution has the basic features of a federation but also a strong unitary bias, and the Indian Constitution is the best known example.