PSIR Optional Paper I practice questions for UPSC Mains 2026.

• Normative reconstruction — Rawls' A Theory of Justice (1971) restored the grand tradition of reasoned argument about justice; Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974) answered it.
• Conceptual analysis — Berlin's Two Concepts of Liberty (1958) showed concepts themselves carry political stakes.
• Historical recovery — Skinner and the Cambridge School restored texts to their linguistic context.
• Identity-based critique — feminist (Okin, Pateman), communitarian (Sandel, Taylor, Walzer), multicultural (Kymlicka) and post-colonial (Parekh) theory.

Open full model answer →

• The post-colonial state is theorised as a state that does not fit the classical Marxist formula of an instrument of a single dominant class, because the colonial inheritance distorted the relation between state and society.
• Hamza Alavi's overdeveloped state (1972) is the founding statement.
• Pranab Bardhan adapted this to India: a dominant coalition of industrial capitalists, rich farmers and the professional bureaucracy, whose competitive subsidy-seeking produces policy paralysis rather than accumulation.

Open full model answer →

• The argument is that freedom is relational.
• Hence Tawney's conclusion that a large measure of equality is not the enemy of liberty but its precondition, and Green's earlier insistence that freedom is a positive power of doing something worth doing.
• The counter is Berlin's: once we say the minnow is not really free, we may end up saying it is not free until it wills what we think it should — the road from positive liberty to coercion in freedom's name.

Open full model answer →

• Utilitarianism rewritten. By distinguishing higher from lower pleasures — better Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied — Mill abandons Bentham's purely quantitative calculus and smuggles a theory of human development into utility.
• Liberty as self-development. Liberty is defended not as a natural right but as the condition of individuality; the end of man is the highest development of his powers. This is Green's positive liberty in embryo.
• Political economy softened. In later editions of Principles of Political Economy and in his Chapters on Socialism, Mill separates laws of production from laws of distribution, defends cooperatives, taxation of unearned increment and inheritance limits.
• Democracy extended, and feared. Considerations on Representative Government (1861) supports votes for women, but also plural voting for the educated and proportional representation, because his real anxiety is the tyranny of the majority over opinion.

Open full model answer →

• Reason has no sex. If rationality is the ground of rights, and women are rational beings, the exclusion of women is a contradiction in Enlightenment thought, not an exception to it.
• Femininity is manufactured, not natural. Women's apparent frivolity is the product of an education that trains them for display. The claim that a false system of education has made them weak, and then blamed the weakness on nature, is her decisive move — the ancestor of the sex/gender distinction.
• Equal education. She proposes national, co-educational day schools, since character cannot be reformed while the sexes are separately trained.
• Marriage as legal prostitution. Denied property, professions and independent income, women trade beauty for maintenance. She demands civil and political existence, and representation of their own.
• Virtue is one. There cannot be a separate feminine virtue of docility; the same standard must apply to both, or morality has no foundation.

Open full model answer →

• Legitimacy is the quality that converts naked power into rightful authority — the reason the ruled obey without being coerced each time.
• The constructivist case is strong.
• But 'construct' is not the same as arbitrary.

Open full model answer →

• Surplus repression — the repression required over and above what scarcity actually demands, imposed to sustain domination rather than civilisation.
• The performance principle — the historically specific form the reality principle takes under capitalism, organising people by their competitive economic performance.

Open full model answer →

• The state does not create rights; it recognises and maintains them. A right exists because a social function requires it, not because a statute confers it.
• Rights are therefore a test of the state, not its gift. The state's claim to obedience is conditional on its maintaining them, which is why Laski defends the citizen's right of resistance and calls obedience a matter of individual conscience.
• The state is only one association among churches, unions and clubs, with no inherently superior moral claim.

Open full model answer →

• The statement is Machiavelli's own conclusion in Chapter 25 of The Prince (1513), and the two concepts are built to support it.
• Fortuna is the domain of chance, circumstance and timing.
• Virtu is emphatically not Christian virtue.

Open full model answer →

• Political democracy rests on social democracy, which he defines as liberty, equality and fraternity as a union of principles. Divorced, liberty destroys equality and equality kills liberty.
• Without it, India enters "a life of contradictions" — one man one vote and one vote one value in politics, sitting on a society that denies equal value in social and economic life. He warned the Constituent Assembly on 25 November 1949 that those denied its benefits will blow up the structure.
• Constitutional methods are the condition. Abandoning them for civil disobedience, non-cooperation and satyagraha once they are available is "the Grammar of Anarchy" — and hero-worship is a surer road to dictatorship in India than anywhere else.

Open full model answer →

• Trusteeship is Gandhi's answer to the question of how to redistribute wealth without violence, and it follows directly from two moral commitments rather than from economics.
• Gandhi's own concession is often missed — he accepted state legislation to enforce trusteeship, and said that if trustees would not act as trustees, the state might take over with minimum exercise of violence.

Open full model answer →

• Time. Representation began as a substitute for the Athenian assembly once polities grew too large. The franchise itself was staged — property, then men, then women, and in India universal adult suffrage from the first election, which was exceptional.
• Place. Westminster majoritarianism suits homogeneous societies; Lijphart's consociational model, with grand coalitions and mutual veto, suits divided ones. India's asymmetric federalism, reserved constituencies and Sixth Schedule are all context-specific adaptations.
• Circumstance. Emergency provisions, coalition governments and anti-defection rules are responses to particular crises.
• Representation deficits — first-past-the-post manufactures majorities from pluralities; women and minorities remain under-represented.
• Accountability between elections — party discipline and anti-defection convert the representative into a delegate of the party, not the voter.
• Money and media — the cost of campaigns, opaque funding, and paid or algorithmically curated news.
• Executive aggrandisement — ordinances, money bills, and legislation with little committee scrutiny hollow out the legislature.

Open full model answer →

• The right space. Equality of income ignores that people convert resources into lives at different rates; a disabled person needs more income for the same mobility. Equality of utility is worse still, because adaptive preference makes the contented deprived appear well off. Capability is the space in which equality should be measured.
• Freedom, not just achievement. What is equalised is the opportunity set, so the approach respects people's differing conceptions of the good.
• Conversion factors. Personal, social and environmental factors mediate resources into capabilities, which is why non-discrimination and public provision matter as much as transfers.
• Pluralism and public reasoning. Sen deliberately refuses a fixed list, holding that weights must come from democratic deliberation.
• Nussbaum's variant does supply a list of ten central capabilities, treated as a threshold each person is entitled to, and grounds it in human dignity.

Open full model answer →

• Swami — the ruler, requiring self-control and training; the head of the organism.
• Amatya — ministers and the civil service, tested by covert means before appointment.
• Janapada — territory and population together, valued for fertility, minerals, water and productive subjects.
• Durga — the fort, the defensive and administrative centre.
• Kosha — the treasury, since all undertakings depend on finance.
• Danda — the army, whose loyalty matters more than its size.
• Mitra — the ally, the only element lying outside the state's own body.

Open full model answer →

• From goods to institutions. Boycott extended to courts, titles and government schools, and produced constructive alternatives — the National Council of Education (1906), Bengal Technical Institute, and swadeshi enterprises. Once Indians were building their own institutions, foreign administration became redundant in principle.
• From petition to self-reliance. Atmashakti replaced the Moderate method of prayer. Tilak's formulation that Swaraj is our birthright and we shall have it made the claim non-negotiable.
• From elite to mass. Samitis, melas, jatras and Tagore's songs carried politics beyond the professional classes for the first time.
• From economics to sovereignty. The drain theory already argued that poverty was political; if impoverishment was made by rule, only self-rule could end it.

Open full model answer →

• The imprint is deep because women appear across every method the freedom struggle used, not merely as auxiliaries to one of them.
• Armed resistance before Gandhi.
• Constitutional and Congress leadership.

Open full model answer →

• Articles 25 to 28 — freedom of conscience and free profession, practice and propagation; freedom to manage religious affairs; no compelled payment of taxes for promoting any religion; no religious instruction in wholly state-funded institutions.
• Articles 14, 15 and 16 — equality before law, prohibition of discrimination on grounds of religion, and equality of opportunity in public employment.
• Articles 29 and 30 — cultural and educational rights of minorities.
• Article 325 — one general electoral roll, with no exclusion on grounds of religion, which abolished the separate electorates that had defined colonial politics.
• No state religion is declared anywhere, and Article 44 anticipates a uniform civil code.

Open full model answer →

• Mandal. The implementation of the Mandal Commission's OBC reservation in 1990 converted caste from a social fact into an organised political constituency, and produced the parties that dominated north India thereafter.
• Democratic deepening. Yogendra Yadav's second democratic upsurge — rising turnout among the poor, Dalits and OBCs, who vote at higher rates than elites, unlike most democracies.
• Reservation and enumeration. Constitutional recognition of SC, ST and OBC categories makes group identity the route to entitlements.
• Federal reorganisation. Linguistic states from 1956, and later Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand and Telangana, made regional identity a viable political scale.

Open full model answer →

• Making the proxy visible — recording who signs, attends and speaks in gram sabha proceedings, with penalties for the non-elected acting in office.
• Capacity building rather than one-off orientation, with literacy, financial and procedural training.
• Rotation designed so that reserved seats are not always new seats.
• Direct transfer of untied funds to the panchayat account operated by the elected representative.

Open full model answer →

• Terms of trade improved in the early 1990s as industrial protection fell and the rupee was devalued, raising the relative price of farm output.
• Export opportunity after the WTO Agreement on Agriculture (1995) — India became a leading exporter of rice, and horticulture, dairy and marine products grew faster than cereals.
• Diversification towards high-value crops, and private investment in cold chains, seeds and agri-processing.
• Public investment in agriculture fell through the 1990s as fiscal compression met an expanding subsidy bill, so the input subsidy crowded out capital formation in irrigation and research.
• Price and income volatility rose with exposure to world markets, without a corresponding risk-management system; the state responded with episodic export bans that hurt the same farmers.
• Input costs rose with decontrol of fertilizer other than urea, and institutional credit did not keep pace, deepening reliance on informal lenders.
• Agrarian distress became visible through the late 1990s, and small and marginal holdings, which are the overwhelming majority, could not capture the gains of diversification.

Open full model answer →