Elections, Representation and Political Parties

• Option (c) is correct. Section 4 of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 requires that a person be an elector for any parliamentary constituency in India in order to be qualified for election to the House of the People, and Article 84 of the Constitution independently requires citizenship. The test is therefore that the person's name appears in the electoral roll of some constituency, which simultaneously establishes citizenship, the age of eighteen and ordinary residence somewhere in India.
• Option (a) is wrong because mere residence in India is insufficient; a foreign national resident in India cannot contest.
• Option (b) is wrong and is the most commonly held misconception: there is no requirement that a candidate be a resident or an elector of the very constituency contested, which is why candidates routinely contest from constituencies other than their home one, and indeed from two constituencies at once.
• Option (d) is wrong because citizenship alone is not enough; a citizen whose name is not on any electoral roll, or who has been disqualified and removed from it, cannot file a nomination. Governing principle: the qualification is enrolment as an elector somewhere in India, not residence, and not citizenship in the abstract. Note the contrast with the Rajya Sabha, where the corresponding requirement is enrolment as an elector in any parliamentary constituency in India, the earlier requirement of domicile in the represented State having been removed in 2003.

The official answer is (c). The case for it rests on Article 326, which provides that elections to the House of the People and to the Legislative Assembly of every State shall be on the basis of adult suffrage, and on Articles 84 and 173, which lay down the qualifications for membership of Parliament and of a State legislature. On this reading the entitlement is traceable to the Constitution itself and is therefore a constitutional right.

• Option (a) is wrong: the right to vote is not in Part III and is not enforceable by petition under Article 32, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly distinguished it from a fundamental right, though the right to know a candidate's antecedents has been read into Article 19(1)(a).
• Option (b) is wrong: a natural right is one asserted as inhering in the person independently of the State, whereas the franchise is conferred and regulated by the political community, with qualifications of age, citizenship and enrolment.
• Option (d) is the option a candidate may well prefer and is the reason this item is difficult rather than moderate, since the mechanics of the franchise, the preparation of electoral rolls, the qualifications and disqualifications and the conduct of elections, are governed by the Representation of the People Acts of 1950 and 1951, and the Supreme Court has more than once described the right to vote as a statutory right, notably in Jyoti Basu and in Kuldip Nayar. The distinction the key adopts is between the source of the entitlement, which is constitutional, and the machinery of its exercise, which is statutory.

• Statement 1 is correct. Under Article 55, the value of the vote of a member of a State Legislative Assembly is obtained by dividing the population of the State by the total number of elected members of its Assembly and then dividing the quotient by one thousand. Since the population per constituency differs greatly across States, the value differs across States as well, from over two hundred for Uttar Pradesh down to single figures for Sikkim. The population used is still that of the 1971 census, frozen by the Forty second Amendment and continued by the Eighty fourth Amendment until the first census after 2026.
• Statement 2 is incorrect. The value of the vote of every elected member of Parliament is identical, whether the member sits in the Lok Sabha or in the Rajya Sabha, because it is derived from a single calculation: the total value of the votes of all MLAs of all States divided by the total number of elected members of both Houses. The figure was 708 for the elections held from 1997 onward and fell to 700 after the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly ceased to exist. The design point is that parity between the two Houses is deliberate, since the President is elected by a single electoral college in which the Union is represented as a whole and not chamber by chamber. Elimination route: statement 1 is standard, which removes (b) and (d), and the single well known number 708 applying to all MPs settles the rest. Note also that nominated members of either House and members of Legislative Councils do not vote at all.

Hence (a).

• Statement 2 is clearly incorrect. Section 8 of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 disqualifies a convicted person for the period of imprisonment and for a further six years from release, not permanently. That alone eliminates (b) and (c).
• Statement 1 is treated as incorrect because mere eligibility to vote is not the test. Article 164(4) permits a non member to hold office as minister for six months, but the person must possess the qualifications for membership of the State legislature, which include a higher minimum age of twenty five for the Legislative Assembly and thirty for the Legislative Council, whereas voting eligibility begins at eighteen. Neither statement stands, giving (d).
• Option (a) fails on this age and qualification distinction.

This item was dropped by the Commission, so no answer was credited and the paper was scored out of ninety nine items. On the merits, statement 1 is incorrect: Section 33(7) of the Representation of the People Act, 1951, as amended in 1996, restricts a candidate to contesting from a maximum of two constituencies, so a bar on three does exist.

• Statement 2 is correct: Devi Lal contested from three constituencies in 1991, which was lawful at the time because the two constituency limit was introduced only in 1996, and his case is among the episodes that prompted the amendment.
• Statement 3 is incorrect: no rule requires a party to bear the cost of consequent bye-elections, though the Law Commission in its 255th report and the Election Commission have both recommended either a one constituency rule or a deposit to defray that cost. On this reading the answer would have been (b), and the most likely ground for dropping the item is the tension created by statement 1, whose phrasing invites a reading about three specifically rather than about the statutory ceiling of two.

• Statement 1 is incorrect, and it inverts the rule. Under the Tenth Schedule a nominated member incurs disqualification if he joins a political party after the expiry of six months from the date on which he takes his seat. The six month window is thus a period of permission, deliberately provided so that a nominated member may align with a party, and the disqualification bites only on joining afterwards.
• Statement 2 is correct. The Tenth Schedule vests the decision on disqualification in the Chairman or Speaker but prescribes no time limit for it, a silence that has allowed defection petitions to remain undecided for the life of a House and that the Supreme Court has repeatedly criticised while suggesting Parliament reconsider the arrangement. Only statement 2 holds, so (b) is correct.
• Options (a) and (c) admit the inverted statement 1, and (d) rejects the accurate statement 2.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. Nominated members of either House of Parliament and of State Legislative Assemblies are excluded from the Electoral College, since they are not elected, and members of Legislative Councils are excluded as well.
• Statement 2 is incorrect, and it inverts the formula. The value of an MLA's vote is the State population of the 1971 census divided by the number of elective Assembly seats, divided again by one thousand. The seat count is in the denominator, so for a given population a larger Assembly means a lower value per MLA, not higher.
• Statement 3 is incorrect. The value of an MLA's vote in Madhya Pradesh is 131 while in Kerala it is 152, so Kerala's is the greater.
• Statement 4 is correct and applies the formula properly. Puducherry's value is 16 against 8 for Arunachal Pradesh, and the reason given is exactly right, since the two had similar 1971 populations but Puducherry has thirty elective seats against Arunachal's sixty, making the population to seats ratio roughly double. Only one statement stands, giving (a).

• Pair 1 is correct. The Bharatiya Jana Sangh was founded in 1951 by Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee after he left the Nehru cabinet over the Nehru Liaquat Pact.
• Pair 3 is correct. Congress for Democracy was formed in February 1977 by Jagjivan Ram, who broke from the Congress on the eve of the post Emergency election and later merged his group with the Janata Party.
• Pairs 2 and 4 are wrong, and the question works by swapping their leaders. C. Rajagopalachari founded the Swatantra Party in 1959 in opposition to Nehruvian planning and the licence regime, so he belongs to pair 4, not pair 2. Acharya Narendra Dev was a leading figure of the Congress Socialist Party and later the Socialist Party, so he belongs to pair 2, not pair 4. Two pairs are correct, giving (b).

• Statement 2 is correct. The reservation is to remain in force for fifteen years from commencement, extendable by Parliament by law.
• Statement 3 is correct. Seats reserved for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes carry a one third reservation for women within that quota, a nested rather than parallel reservation.
• Statement 1 is incorrect and is the discriminator. The Act does not commence with the 18th Lok Sabha. It takes effect only after the first census conducted after commencement and the delimitation exercise undertaken on the basis of that census, which necessarily pushes implementation beyond the 18th Lok Sabha elected in 2024. Many candidates assumed the next general election would trigger it, which is exactly the error the question exploits.

Hence 2 and 3 only, which is (c).

• Statement I is incorrect because it confuses two distinct disqualification routes. For disqualifications under Article 102(1), covering office of profit, unsoundness of mind, insolvency and the like, the question is referred to the President, whose decision is final and is taken in accordance with the opinion of the Election Commission under Article 103. For disqualification on the ground of defection under the Tenth Schedule, paragraph 6 vests the decision in the Chairman or the Speaker of the House concerned, not in the President, and the President has no role. The statement also wrongly substitutes the opinion of the Council of Ministers for that of the Election Commission, compounding the error.
• Statement II is incorrect and is the easier of the two to reject. The Tenth Schedule, inserted by the Fifty-second Amendment in 1985, is built entirely around the concept of the political party, using the expressions original political party and legislature party throughout, and Article 102(2) and Article 191(2) refer to it as well. The Constitution as originally enacted did not use the term, which is likely the source of the confusion, but the Tenth Schedule introduced it. Neither statement holds, giving (d).
• Options (a), (b) and (c) each retain one of the two errors.