question_answer

Explain how Indian partition was a culmination of communal politics that started developing in the opening decades of the 20th century.

Or

Explain how the Constitution of India protects the rights of the Central Government and the States.

Answer:

By the end of the 19th century, several nationalist movements had emerged in India. As colonizers, the British had followed a divide-and-rule policy in India. In the census they categorized people according to religion and viewed and treated them as separate from each other.

There was also an ideological divide between the Muslims and the Hindus of India. While there were strong feelings of nationalism in India, by the late 19th century there were also communal conflicts and movements in the country that were based on religious identities rather than class or regional ones. Some people felt that the very nature of Islam called for a communal Muslim society.

Separate electorates for Muslims which was created by the colonial government in 1909 and then expanded in 1919, crucially shaped the nature of communal politics. Religious identities thus acquired a functional use within a modern political system and the logic of electoral politics deepened and hardened these identities.

During the 1920s and early 1930s tension grew around a number of issues. Muslims were angered by music-before-mosque, by the cow protection movement, and by the efforts of the Arya Samaj to bring back to the Hindu fold (shuddhi) those who had recently converted to Islam.

Hindu revivalists also wanted to change the official script from the Persian to the Hindu Devanagri script, effectively making Hindi rather than Urdu the main candidate for the national language.

Hindus were angered by the rapid spread of tabligh and organization after 1923. Middle class publicists and communal activists sought to build greater solidarity within their communities, mobilizing people against the other community.

Though Muslim League and Congress joined hands in 1916 but by then communal politics had taken its grip.

Though communal divide is a major factor in the partition of India but there were several other factors and especially what all transpired in the last decade before independence. There had been some hope of an undivided India, but the Congress? rejection of the interim government set up under the Cabinet Mission Plan in 1942 convinced the leaders of the Muslim League that compromise was impossible and partition was the only course to take.

While the Indian National Congress was calling for Britain to Quit India, in 1943 the Muslim League passed a resolution demanding the British Divide and Quit. Thus communal politics which started in 1909 paved way for Muslim League?s two national theory, antagonistic interests of Hindus and Muslims leading to divide of India into Pakistan and India.

Or

Indian is quasi federal state. This means that India has features of a federation as well as unitary government at the center. But this was a debated topic in the Constituent Assembly that what should be the respective rights of the Central Government and the states.

India has two sets of government the Central or Union government and the State government. The Central government works for the whole country and the State governments look after the States. The areas of activity of both the governments are different.

The Constitution of India has divided powers between the Central government and the state governments. The Seventh Schedule of the Constitution contains three lists of subjects which show how division of power is made between the two sets of government. Both the governments have their separate powers and responsibilities.

Written Constitution: The Constitution of India is written. Every provision of the Constitution is clearly written down and has been discussed in detail. Thus defining the rights of center and state.

The constitution provides for three lists of subjects: Union, State, and Concurrent. The subjects in the first list are to be the preserve of the Central Government, while those in the second list are vested with the states and the third list Centre and state shared responsibility.

Article 356 gives the Centre the powers to take over a state administration on the recommendation of the Governor. In special cases such as emergency, the nature of Indian political structure becomes more unitary.

The Constitution also mandates for a complex system of fiscal federalism. In the case of some taxes such as customs duties and Company taxes the Centre retained all the proceeds and in other cases such as-income tax and excise duties, it shared them with the states and in still other cases such as estate duties it assigned them wholly to the states.

There is provision of bicameralism Le two houses at the center Rajya Sabha enjoys some powers in the matters of state importance and Central government cannot make laws on specific articles except in some situation without the consent of Rajya Sabha. Therefore, Indian Constitution safeguards the rights of center as well as state.