Right to Freedom Questions and Answers

Answer: C

(A) is true, but (R) is false.

In Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India (2017) a nine-judge bench unanimously held that the right to privacy is protected as an intrinsic part of the right to life and personal liberty under Article 21 and as part of the freedoms in Part III, overruling M.P. Sharma and Kharak Singh to the extent they held otherwise. So the Assertion is true.

The Reason is false. Privacy is not expressly enumerated anywhere in Part III; the Court had to derive it from Article 21 and the other freedoms precisely because it is not written into the text. A false Reason cannot explain anything, so both 'both true' options fail.

Answer: A

The case is primarily associated with the right to emergency medical care.

In Parmanand Katara v. Union of India (1989) the Supreme Court held that every doctor, in a government or private hospital, has a professional obligation to give immediate medical aid to an injured person to preserve life, without waiting for police formalities in medico-legal cases.

The Court grounded this in Article 21, which is why 'Right to life and personal liberty' is a tempting option, but that is the general right; the specific right the case established is emergency medical treatment. The right to a clean environment and the right to a speedy trial come from other lines of cases, such as the M.C. Mehta and Hussainara Khatoon decisions.

Answer: D

The wrongly matched pair is Article 22.2 - Parliament may by law prescribe the circumstances under which a person may be detained for a period longer than three months.

That power belongs to Article 22(7). Article 22(2) is the rule that an arrested person must be produced before the nearest magistrate within twenty-four hours.

The other three pairs are correct. Article 22(1) gives an arrested person both the right to be told the grounds of arrest and the right to consult and be defended by a legal practitioner of his choice, so the first two options are right. Article 22(4) says no preventive detention law shall authorise detention for longer than three months unless an Advisory Board reports sufficient cause.