Indian Polity GK Questions with Answers – Page 41

It empowers the President to grant pardon, reprieve, respite, remission, suspension or commutation of punishment in cases of a sentence by court martial, offences against laws on matters within the Union's executive power, and all cases of a sentence of death.

Under Article 111 the President may return a bill for reconsideration only if it is not a Money Bill; for a Money Bill the choice is confined to giving assent or withholding it.

The bill, which would have allowed the interception of postal articles, was neither assented to nor returned by President Zail Singh, who simply kept it pending, and it lapsed; this is the standing Indian illustration of a pocket veto.

A qualified veto is one that the legislature can override only by a special higher majority, such as two-thirds; it belongs to the American President and not to the Indian one, because when the Indian President returns a bill a simple majority in both Houses is enough to compel assent.

The arithmetic is worth learning. Article 85 requires that six months shall not intervene between the last sitting of one session and the first sitting of the next, so the longest an ordinance can run before Parliament reassembles is six months; Article 123 then allows it six weeks more from…

An ordinance must be laid before both Houses when Parliament reassembles, and it ceases to operate on the expiry of six weeks from the date of reassembly, or earlier if both Houses pass resolutions disapproving it.

It empowers the President to promulgate an ordinance when Parliament, or either House of it, is not in session and the President is satisfied that circumstances exist which make immediate action necessary; such an ordinance has the same force and effect as an Act of Parliament.

Every citizen of India who is eighteen years of age or more may vote, and the age is the same for men and women.

The United States gives every person two citizenships, of the union and of the state of residence, while India deliberately gives one citizenship for the whole country, so that no state may treat the people of another state as outsiders.

It changed the description of the country from a sovereign democratic republic to a sovereign socialist secular democratic republic, and changed the unity of the nation to the unity and integrity of the nation.

In that period the assembly held eleven sessions and sat for one hundred and sixty-five days, and the draft was debated clause by clause.

Canada is the federation that keeps residuary powers with the centre instead of leaving them with the units, appoints the head of each province from the centre and allows its supreme court an advisory jurisdiction, and all three features were adopted in India.

The Weimar constitution allowed the President to suspend civil liberties in an emergency, and the Indian provisions under which the operation of certain Fundamental Rights may be restricted during a proclamation of emergency follow that model.

The Australian constitution has a list of subjects on which both the federal and the state legislatures may make law, and India adopted the device as the Concurrent List in the Seventh Schedule, with central law prevailing in case of conflict.

Two features are traced to the South African constitution: the procedure for amending the Constitution, which combines a special majority with the consent of States for some provisions, and the election of members of the Rajya Sabha by the elected members of the State legislative assemblies through proportional representation by…

India had no such chapter at first; ten Fundamental Duties were added in 1976 by the Forty-second Amendment on the recommendation of the Swaran Singh Committee, and an eleventh, the duty of a parent to provide education to a child, was added later.

The Irish constitution of 1937 carried a chapter of directive principles of social policy, non-justiciable goals addressed to the legislature, and the Constituent Assembly adopted that device as Part IV of our Constitution, along with the nomination of members to the Rajya Sabha and the method of electing the President.

About two-thirds of the provisions of the Constitution follow that Act, which supplied the federal scheme with its lists of subjects, the office of the Governor, the structure and powers of the judiciary, the public service commissions, the emergency provisions and most of the administrative detail.

Article 17 abolishes untouchability and forbids its practice in any form, and declares that the enforcement of any disability arising out of untouchability shall be an offence punishable by law.

Article 324 vests the superintendence, direction and control of the preparation of electoral rolls and the conduct of all elections to Parliament, to the state legislatures and to the offices of President and Vice-President in the Election Commission.