PSIR Optional Paper I practice questions for UPSC Mains 2026.

• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• Article 75(3) — collective responsibility to the Lok Sabha. The Council of Ministers holds office only while it commands confidence. Effectiveness: real but blunt. With a stable majority the confidence motion is unusable, and party discipline plus the anti-defection law under the Tenth Schedule make individual MPs unable to dissent without losing their seats.
• Article 74(1) — the President acts on aid and advice, but may require reconsideration once. Effectiveness: limited to a delaying and signalling power. Its live use today is by Governors sitting on State Bills, which the Supreme Court has repeatedly held cannot be done indefinitely.
• Articles 13, 32 and 226 — judicial review. Executive action is void if it violates fundamental rights, and the writ jurisdiction is itself part of the basic structure. Effectiveness: the strongest restraint on paper and often in fact, but weakened by delay, by deference in national-security matters, and by the practical difficulty of enforcing orders against the state.
• Article 148 with Article 151 — the Comptroller and Auditor General. Independent audit reported to the legislature, examined by the Public Accounts Committee. Effectiveness: powerful in exposure, weak in consequence; reports arrive years late and PAC recommendations are not binding.
• Article 123 — the ordinance power, limited to when Parliament is not in session and requiring approval within six weeks of reassembly. Effectiveness: the restraint was hollow while re-promulgation was practised, until Krishna Kumar Singh v. State of Bihar (2017) held re-promulgation a fraud on the Constitution.

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• Insider–outsider or sons-of-the-soil conflict, over land, jobs and demographic anxiety. Assam is the archetype: the citizenship question, the updated NRC exercise published in 2019, and recurring violence in the western districts, including the Bodo–Muslim clashes of 2012 and the killings of 2014.
• Tribe versus tribe, and tribal versus non-tribal. Manipur since May 2023 is the gravest instance — Meitei and Kuki-Zo communities separated into ethnically exclusive zones, with the demand for Scheduled Tribe status for the Meitei and control of hill land as proximate triggers.
• Autonomy and homeland movements within States. Gorkhaland in the Darjeeling hills, which produced the Gorkhaland Territorial Administration in 2011 and renewed agitation in 2017; Bodoland, settled for now by the Bodo Accord of 2020; and demands for Sixth Schedule status in Ladakh.
• Secessionist conflict in transition to negotiated settlement. The Naga movement, under ceasefire since 1997, produced the Framework Agreement of 2015 but no final settlement, with the flag and separate constitution unresolved.
• Displacement-driven ethnic conflict. The Bru-Reang, displaced from Mizoram, resettled in Tripura under the agreement of 2020.
• Linguistic and sub-regional assertion, which is largely non-violent and works through statehood — Telangana, created in 2014, is the successful case.

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• The Common Minimum Programme — the United Front's in 1996, the NDA's National Agenda for Governance in 1998, and the UPA's CMP in 2004 — converted ideological distance into a negotiated written contract.
• Coordination machinery — the UF Steering Committee and the UPA-Left Coordination Committee gave allies a standing forum outside the Cabinet.
• Federalisation. Regional parties entering national office made state interests a permanent presence in Union decisions, which is why the coalition decades also saw the Inter-State Council activated and Article 356 used far more sparingly after S. R. Bommai (1994).
• Policy moderation. Allies acted as a brake on the ideological programmes of the largest party, and the government of the day had to explain itself continuously rather than only at elections.

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• Against the States — fiscal autonomy is conditional, expenditure decisions of elected State governments become subject to Union discretion, and States argue that consent under clause (3) cannot be converted into a general power to cap total borrowing.
• For the Union — State fiscal stress becomes a macroeconomic and sovereign-rating problem for the whole country, and a State that borrows without limit externalises its costs.

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• Costs are immediate and concentrated; benefits are deferred and diffuse. A closed polluting unit costs identifiable jobs before the next election; cleaner air accrues to everyone slowly and to no constituency in particular.
• The victims are politically weak. Those worst hit by degraded air, water and forests are the poor, and environmental harm rarely determines votes.
• Growth is the competing mandate. Clearances become a measure of ease of doing business, so regulation is read as an obstacle to investment.
• Institutional under-capacity is a choice. State Pollution Control Boards run with vacancies and inadequate laboratories, and the Environment Impact Assessment process has been diluted by post-facto clearances that reward violation.

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