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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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