SSC CHSL GK Questions 2026

Commutation changes the nature of the punishment itself, substituting a lighter kind for the one awarded, so that a death sentence becomes imprisonment for life or rigorous imprisonment becomes simple imprisonment.

Article 161 confines the Governor's power to offences against laws on matters to which the state's executive power extends, and it does not extend to pardoning a death sentence, which under Article 72 belongs to the President alone; a Governor also cannot touch a sentence passed by a court martial.

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.

On 14 January 1761 the Afghan ruler Ahmad Shah Abdali defeated the Maratha army led by Sadashivrao Bhau, in which the young Vishwasrao was also killed, and the defeat ended the Maratha bid to succeed the Mughals as the paramount power of northern India.

Installed by the Company in place of Mir Jafar, Mir Qasim moved his capital from Murshidabad to Munger in Bihar precisely to put distance between himself and the Company's establishment at Calcutta, raised a new army and abolished the inland duties that the Company's servants were evading; the quarrel that…

He moved the seat of government from Faizabad to Lucknow and in 1784 built the Bara Imambara there as a famine relief work, employing thousands on it, and so began the age of nawabi Lucknow with its architecture, cuisine and courtly culture.

The Fourth Anglo-Mysore War closed with the storming of Seringapatam, Tipu Sultan's capital, in which he was killed on 4 May 1799; Mysore then passed to a restored Wodeyar ruler under a subsidiary alliance.

Mysore under Haidar Ali and then Tipu Sultan built iron-cased war rockets and organised regular rocket units, using them against the English in the Anglo-Mysore wars; specimens taken at Seringapatam were studied in England and shaped the rockets developed there.

Tipu openly identified with the French Revolution: he planted a Tree of Liberty at Seringapatam, allowed a Jacobin club to be formed there, let himself be addressed as a citizen and sought a French alliance against the English.

Clive arranged after 1765 that the Company should hold the Diwani, the right to collect revenue, while the Nawab kept the Nizamat, the duty of administration and justice without the money to perform it; the result was a government in which nobody was answerable, and the famine of 1770 followed.

After Buxar the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II granted the Company the Diwani of these provinces, which gave it a legal title to their revenues and turned a trading body into a territorial power.

At Buxar on 22 October 1764 Hector Munro defeated this alliance of the deposed Nawab of Bengal, the reigning Mughal emperor and the Nawab of Awadh, and the Treaty of Allahabad of 1765 followed.

Clive commanded the forces of the East India Company at Plassey on 23 June 1757 and defeated Siraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, a victory owed chiefly to the defection of the Nawab's commander Mir Jafar.

He served as Mughal governor of the Deccan and for a short time as wazir of the empire, and on withdrawing to the south in 1724 he ruled as Nizam-ul-Mulk Asaf Jah, founding the line of the Nizams of Hyderabad.