UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

It inserted Article 164(1A), under which the total number of Ministers in a State, including the Chief Minister, shall not exceed fifteen per cent of the total number of members of the Legislative Assembly, subject to a floor of twelve Ministers.

Article 161 gives the Governor power to grant pardons, reprieves, respites and remissions of punishment, and to suspend, remit or commute a sentence, in cases relating to matters to which the executive power of the State extends.

Article 159 says the oath of office is administered by the Chief Justice of the High Court exercising jurisdiction in relation to the State, and in his absence by the senior-most judge of that Court available.

Article 157 lays down only two qualifications for the office: the person must be a citizen of India and must have completed thirty-five years of age.

It provides that the Governor of a State shall be appointed by the President by warrant under his hand and seal.

A bicameral State legislature has a Legislative Assembly and a Legislative Council, and Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh each have both Houses.

Article 168 says a State legislature consists of the Governor and either one House or two Houses. Where there are two, the upper House is the Legislative Council or Vidhan Parishad, and Karnataka is one of the few States that has kept it.

Basavanna was a minister in the Kalachuri court in twelfth-century Karnataka and led the Virashaiva or Lingayat movement, whose followers wore the linga on their body, rejected temple ritual, Brahmanical authority and caste, and composed short prose-poems called vachanas in Kannada; Akka Mahadevi and Allama Prabhu belong to the same…

Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti, remembered as Gharib Nawaz or helper of the poor, brought the Chishti order to India towards the end of the twelfth century and settled at Ajmer in Rajasthan, where his tomb became one of the most visited shrines in the subcontinent for Hindus and Muslims alike.

Established in India at Multan by Shaikh Bahauddin Zakariya, it held that a mystic could accept land, wealth and office from the state and still lead a spiritual life, and its shaikhs worked closely with the Sultans of Delhi.

Tulsidas retold the story of Rama in the Awadhi speech of eastern Uttar Pradesh, which put the epic within reach of people who could not read Sanskrit and made the Ramcharitmanas the most widely recited devotional work of north India.

Writing in the eighth century, he argued that Brahman alone is real, that the individual soul is not different from Brahman, and that the world as ordinarily perceived is the work of maya; this is Advaita, non-dualism.

The Alvars were the twelve Vaishnava saint-poets of the Tamil country, active roughly between the sixth and the ninth centuries, whose hymns were later gathered as the Divya Prabandham and sung in temples.

The second Guru standardised and popularised Gurmukhi, the script in which the hymns of the Gurus were written down, and this made it possible to preserve the teaching of the movement in the language its followers actually spoke.

Amir Khusrau served as a poet at the courts of several Delhi Sultans, but his spiritual allegiance was to Nizamuddin Auliya, and he was buried beside his master.

Mahbub-i-Ilahi means the beloved of God, and it is the title by which this Chishti master of Delhi has been known for seven centuries.

A khanqah was the hospice or lodge where a Sufi master lived with his disciples, taught, held assemblies of devotional music and fed whoever came to the door, whatever their faith or caste.

The National Securities Depository Limited was set up in 1996, the year the Depositories Act was passed, and was the first depository in India; it holds securities in electronic form so that shares need not change hands as paper certificates, a process called dematerialisation.

It defines what a security is, provides for the recognition of stock exchanges by the Government, and lays down the framework within which contracts in securities may be made; it is the oldest of the statutes governing this market and still the basic one.

SEBI has its head office in Mumbai, at the Bandra Kurla Complex, which places the regulator in the same city as the Bombay Stock Exchange, the National Stock Exchange and the Reserve Bank of India, making Mumbai the financial capital of the country.