PSIR Optional Paper I practice questions for UPSC Mains 2026.

• 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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• Participatory inversion. Unlike most democracies, turnout in India is higher among the poor, rural, Dalit and Adivasi voters than among the urban affluent — Yogendra Yadav's second democratic upsurge. Women's turnout has risen to equal or exceed men's.
• The decline of the single dominant party and its partial return. The Congress system gave way to fragmentation and coalitions from 1989, and to a re-nationalised contest after 2014, with split-ticket voting between national and State elections now routine.
• Caste as a coalition, not a bloc. Caste still structures voting, but as an assembled coalition of communities rather than automatic bloc transfer; Jaffrelot's silent revolution and Rajni Kothari's earlier account of the politicisation of caste both apply.
• Anti-incumbency giving way to performance and welfare voting. Delivery of tangible benefits — the labharthi or beneficiary vote — now competes with identity as a predictor.
• Leader-centred and increasingly presidentialised national voting, with the prime ministerial choice weighing heavily.
• Manufacturing consensus. Coordinated volume creates a false impression of majority opinion, and voters, using social proof as a shortcut, adjust towards the apparent majority — a bandwagon effect built on fabricated evidence.
• Agenda setting. Trending topics are treated by news media as news, so the fabricated agenda enters mainstream coverage.

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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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• Design. Ad hoc tribunals are constituted afresh for each dispute, with no time limit for years, no standing data agency, and awards that acquire finality only on notification.
• Scarcity and demand. Irrigation expansion, urban and industrial demand, groundwater depletion and increasingly erratic monsoons have made every basin over-allocated relative to firm availability.
• Federal politics. Water is a mobilising issue in State elections, so no chief minister can be seen to concede; regional parties raise the cost of compromise.
• Absent shared facts. Disputes over the flow data itself make bargaining impossible.

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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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