Constitution, Social Justice and Human Rights Questions and Answers

Answer: D

The philosopher is John Locke.

In his Two Treatises of Government (1689), Locke argued that people have natural rights to life, liberty and property, and that governments exist by consent to protect these rights; a government that violates them may be resisted. His ideas influenced the American Declaration of Independence and modern human rights thinking.

Thomas Paine wrote Rights of Man in the eighteenth century, John Stuart Mill On Liberty in the nineteenth, and Hegel was a nineteenth-century German philosopher; none fits a seventeenth-century English philosopher.

Answer: B

UNHCR's mandate is to protect refugees, forcibly displaced communities and stateless people.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, created in 1950, leads international action to protect refugees and stateless people, assist them, and find durable solutions: voluntary repatriation, local integration or resettlement in a third country. It works under the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol.

UNHCR does not repatriate refugees by military means, and creating a new country for refugees is not part of its mandate, so 'None of the above' is also wrong.

Answer: B

Article 41 ensures the right to work, education and public assistance in cases of unemployment, old age and sickness.

Article 41, a Directive Principle, directs the State, within the limits of its economic capacity, to make effective provision for securing the right to work, to education and to public assistance in cases of unemployment, old age, sickness and disablement, and in other cases of undeserved want. Schemes such as old age pensions and MGNREGA reflect it.

Rights to food, drinking water and housing are not listed in Article 41, and 'public assistance in cases of transport' does not appear in the Constitution.

Answer: C

Social justice means the absence of privileges being extended to any particular section of the society.

In the Indian constitutional sense, social justice means equal treatment of all citizens without social distinctions based on caste, religion, sex or birth, and the removal of privileges enjoyed by particular groups. It also justifies special measures for disadvantaged groups to bring them to equality.

Equal voting rights describe political justice, equal economic rights economic justice, and equal travel rights a limited civil freedom; each covers only one narrow aspect rather than the meaning of social justice.

Answer: B

The Constituent Assembly was elected by the elected members of the provincial assemblies.

Under the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946, members of the Constituent Assembly for the British Indian provinces were elected indirectly by the members of the provincial legislative assemblies, which had themselves been elected in 1946, through proportional representation by single transferable vote. Princely states nominated their representatives.

The Parliament of India and the state assemblies came into being only under the Constitution the Assembly drafted, and the British Parliament played no part in electing it.

Answer: C

People attracted to the same sex are as normal as heterosexual persons.

Homosexuality is a natural variation of human sexuality. The American Psychiatric Association removed it from its list of mental disorders in 1973 and the World Health Organization from the ICD in 1990. In India, the Supreme Court in Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India (2018) read down Section 377 to decriminalise consensual same-sex relations between adults.

It is therefore neither a mental illness needing treatment nor abnormal, and it has been recorded in every culture, including India's, so it is not a western phenomenon.

Answer: B

On the key, sexual harassment is defined in terms of (i) and (iii).

The 2013 Act defines sexual harassment broadly as unwelcome acts or behaviour, whether physical contact and advances, a demand or request for sexual favours, sexually coloured remarks, showing pornography, or any other unwelcome physical, verbal or non-verbal conduct of a sexual nature. That covers both contact and non-contact behaviour (i). The test is that the conduct is unwelcome, so it is judged by its impact on the aggrieved woman (iii), not by what the accused intended.

Statement (ii) is too narrow, and (iv) is rejected because the intention of the accused is not the test, so options including them are wrong.

Answer: A

Every organisation should constitute an Internal Complaint Committee.

Section 4 of the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act, 2013 requires every employer with ten or more employees to constitute an Internal Complaints Committee, chaired by a senior woman employee, with at least half its members women and one external member from an NGO or person familiar with the issue. Where there are fewer than ten employees, complaints go to a Local Committee set up at the district level.

'Internal Grievance Committee', 'External Complaint Committee' and 'Sexual Harassment Prevention Committee' are not the names used in the Act.

Answer: D

The answer is Smt Annie Besant.

Annie Besant died in 1933, more than ten years before the Constituent Assembly first met in December 1946, so she could not have been a member. Sarojini Naidu, Durgabai Deshmukh and Hansa Mehta were among the fifteen women members of the Constituent Assembly.

Strictly, the seven-member Drafting Committee chaired by Dr B.R. Ambedkar had no women members at all; the question uses 'Drafting Committee' for the Assembly that framed the Constitution. Either way, Besant is the one who was not part of it.

Answer: B

India ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child on 11 December 1992.

The UN General Assembly adopted the CRC in November 1989, and it came into force in 1990. India acceded to it on 11 December 1992, committing itself to the rights of every child to survival, development, protection and participation.

1987 is before the Convention existed, and 1994 and 1996 are later than the actual date.