SOCIAL SCIENCE

Textbook in Political Science

for Class IX

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0972 – DEMOCRATIC POLITICS – I
ISBN 81-7450-537-7
Textbook in Political Science for Class IX

First Edition ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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Research and Training, 2006
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FOREWORD
The National Curriculum Framework (NCF), 2005, recommends that
children’s life at school must be linked to their life outside the school. This
principle marks a departure from the legacy of bookish learning which
continues to shape our system and causes a gap between the school, home
and community. The syllabi and textbooks developed on the basis of NCF
signify an attempt to implement this basic idea. They also attempt to
discourage rote learning and the maintenance of sharp boundaries between
different subject areas. We hope these measures will take us significantly
further in the direction of a child-centred system of education outlined in
the National Policy on Education (1986).
The success of this effort depends on the steps that school principals and
teachers will take to encourage children to reflect on their own learning and
to pursue imaginative activities and questions. We must recognise that given
space, time and freedom, children generate new knowledge by engaging with
the information passed on to them by adults. Treating the prescribed textbook
as the sole basis of examination is one of the key reasons why other resources
and sites of learning are ignored. Inculcating creativity and initiative is
possible if we perceive and treat children as participants in learning, not as
receivers of a fixed body of knowledge.
These aims imply considerable change in school routines and mode of
functioning. Flexibility in the daily time-table is as necessary as rigour in
implementing the annual calendar so that the required number of teaching
days is actually devoted to teaching. The methods used for teaching and
evaluation will also determine how effective this textbook proves for making
children’s life at school a happy experience, rather than a source of stress or
boredom. Syllabus designers have tried to address the problem of curricular
burden by restructuring and reorienting knowledge at different stages with
greater consideration for child psychology and the time available for teaching.
The textbook attempts to enhance this endeavour by giving higher priority
and space to opportunities for contemplation and wondering, discussion in
small groups, and activities requiring hands-on experience.
The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT)
appreciates the hard work done by the textbook development committee
responsible for this book. We wish to thank the Chairperson of the advisory
group in Social Sciences, Professor Hari Vasudevan and the Chief Advisors

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for this book, Professor Yogendra Yadav and Professor Suhas Palshikar for
guiding the work of this committee. Several teachers contributed to the
development of this textbook; we are grateful to their principals for making
this possible. We are indebted to the institutions and organisations which
have generously permitted us to draw upon their resources, material and
personnel. We are especially grateful to the members of the National
Monitoring Committee, appointed by the Department of Secondary and
Higher Education, Ministry of Human Resource Development under the
Chairmanship of Professor Mrinal Miri and Professor G.P. Deshpande, for
their valuable time and contribution. As an organisation committed to
systemic reform and continuous improvement in the quality of its products,
NCERT welcomes comments and suggestions which will enable us to
undertake further revision and refinement.

Director
New Delhi National Council of Educational
20 December 2005 Research and Training

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A LETTER FOR YOU
Dear teachers and parents,

‘Civics is boring’. You may have heard this from your students or your child.
You may have felt that they had a point. Syllabi of Civics in our country
tend to focus on formal institutions of government. The textbooks are full of
constitutional, legal and procedural details, presented in a dry and abstract
manner. No wonder children experience disconnect between the theory they
read in the textbook and what they see in real life around them. This is
perhaps what makes Civics ‘boring’ for young adults in a country otherwise
full of passion for politics.
The present textbook is a small step towards changing this. The impetus
came from the National Curriculum Framework 2005 that provided the space
and opportunity to bring about this basic change. The foreword to this book
by the Director of the NCERT explains the philosophy of the new curriculum.
It meant a complete overhaul of the traditional Civics syllabi. The change in
the name – from Civics to Political Science – reflects the shift in the focus. The
new syllabi recognise that the student at this stage is aware of and needs to
know more about politics. Accordingly, the students in classes IX and X will
be offered an introduction to various facets of politics. Democracy is the
window through which they get to look at the theory and the practice of
politics.
With this textbook you are going to take the students on a tour of a
museum of contemporary democracy. You will first take them quickly
through a series of stories from different parts of the world. Once they develop
a sense and feel of democracy, you can ask some reflective questions: what
is democracy? Why democracy? With this clarity you can take them to a
gallery on constitutions. An understanding of what and how of the
constitutions would prepare them for an exhibition on three aspects of
democratic politics: elections, institutions and rights. You may encounter
many contentious themes during this tour. Our attempt here is not to hand
over a definite opinion to the students but to enable them to think on their
own.
This textbook is meant to help the students enjoy this tour and to assist
you in guiding them. It does not merely inform the students. It encourages
them to think on their own. It interacts with them through questions, moves

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them with stories and pictures and tickles them with cartoons. It helps you
in reviewing their progress and in getting them involved with activities. All
these features have meant taking more space than used to be the case earlier.
It is precisely to reduce the information load that the book takes more pages.
Please do read ‘How to use this book’ on the following pages to be able to
use these features of the book. The tour will continue in the textbook for class
X and will focus more on the working of democracy. We hope this tour will
create interest in them to understand politics more carefully and to help them
become active and participant citizens.
This hope of ours rests on you. That is why this book makes more
demands on you. You may have to learn more about new names, events and
places. You may face questions that the textbook does not answer. You may
have to guide the students through sensitive and passionate debates that
naturally arise when we discuss politics. Just when you begin to feel tired or
irritated, do entertain a thought. When your student asks a question that
you find difficult to answer, when she seeks information that is not easy to
find or expresses an opinion that you don’t approve of, this may actually be
a sign of your success as a teacher or a parent. As we all know, getting
students to question is critical to their learning process both as a student
and as citizens of a democracy. This is what the present book tries to cultivate.
The desire to get rid of the ‘boring Civics’ tag brought together, perhaps for
the first time in our country, a group of political scientists, school teachers and
educationists to think about how to teach politics to our next generation. You
can read about this group, the Textbook Development Committee, on page
xii. All these colleagues spared their valuable time and mental space for this
unscheduled event in their academic calendar. Professor Krishna Kumar,
Director NCERT, not only dragged some of us into this pleasant duty but
also supported us at every stage. Professor Hari Vasudevan and Professor
Gopal Guru provided this experiment the protection it needed. Professor
Mrinal Miri, Professor G. P. Deshpande and other members of the National
Monitoring Committee offered valuable inputs and criticisms. The experiment
gained many friends on the way: Ambassador Jorge Heine, Arvind Sardana,
Aditya Nigam, Suman Lata and Chandni Khanduja read different parts of the
draft and provided valuable inputs. At many points it drew upon Lokniti research
programme and Lokniti network of the Centre for the Study of Developing
Societies for intellectual and logistic resources. Above all, this experiment drew
upon the insights and energy of Alex M. George, Pankaj Pushkar and Manish
Jain – three young educationists committed to a radical pedagogy — who
taught us how to think about the challenge of school education. Designer Oroon
Das and cartoonist Irfan Khan and copy editor Devyani Onial helped us turn
the idea of this book into a reality.
We sincerely hope that you and the students would enjoy this book and
perhaps look at politics as something valuable, something worth taking
seriously, something worth studying. We look forward to your feedback.

K. C. Suri Yogendra Yadav

ADVISOR Suhas Palshikar
CHIEF ADVISORS

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How to use this book?
OVERVIEW comes at the beginning of each chapter. You can use it to understand
the purpose of the chapter and how it links with the rest of the book. It also
helps you explain the rationale behind the different sections of the chapter. If
you are in doubt about what to teach, what to emphasise and what kind of
questions to ask, please do refer back to the overview.

Sections and Sub-sections help you break the chapter into small bits that
you can take up one by one. Each chapter is usually divided into four
sections, each of which you can complete within about three periods. Section
Heading(s) are numbered and announce the beginning of a fresh theme within
the chapter. Sub-section heading(s) provide convenient breaks for you to
sum up one point and move to the next. Boxes are very much part of the
main text and are meant to be taught. They provide additional information
or analysis that requires a little detour.

Each chapter begins with one or more real life stories or imagined dialogues.
This is to create an interest and understanding of some central issues
discussed in the chapter. Sometimes smaller stories or examples are used to
lead the student into a section or sub-section. Please do tell this story in all
its details. If you can, please add more details to those given here. You don’t
need to bother very much if the student does not grasp the full significance
of the story at this stage. As the chapter develops, it draws upon from the
initial story and moves from the concrete to the abstract. But please do not
ask the students to memorise the facts and details of the story like the year,
names of personalities or places, etc. The same applies to any other example
used in this book. This would kill their interest and defeat the very purpose
of using stories. If the story is good, some details will stay in their memory.
Even if no details stay with them but they can draw the general point from
any such instance, we have succeeded in our task.

Munni and Unni are two characters specially designed for this book by
cartoonist Irfan Khan. The two of them keep appearing every now and then
to ask all kinds of questions: impish, irrelevant, irreverent or even impossible.
The questions are sparked off by the points made in the text. But in most
cases you will not find the answer in the textbook itself. Munni and Unni are

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there to assure the students that the kind of ‘funny’ thoughts that often
come to their minds are not stupid and to give them the courage to ask such
questions. They give you the space to take a detour and get into a side
discussion that is often richer than the main one. Please do not use these
questions for evaluation.

You would notice lots of cartoons and pictures in this book. This brings
visual relief and some fun. But these images are meant to do more. These
are parts of the teaching and learning process. The caption to each visual
provides background information to help the student appreciate the message. read
It also asks them questions. Please do stop at each cartoon or visual and get
the students involved in reading the message. If you can, please select some
the
more cartoons from your regional languages and use them. Similarly there cartoon
are several maps and many more references to countries unknown to the
students. One of the aims of this book is to expand the student’s imagination
beyond our own country. Please keep and refer to a recent political map of
the world while teaching this book.

Check your progress questions come usually at the end of every section.
These questions give you an opportunity to ensure that the students
comprehend the things discussed in that section. These questions also
indicate to you the kind of learning you might wish to emphasise. May we CHECK
urge you to please make more questions of this kind so that the student can
move away from learning by rote.
YOUR
PROGRESS
Activity may involve getting the students together within the classroom
or doing things outside the classroom. You would need to guide them by
assigning tasks to individuals or to groups. The activity and its location
in the chapter is only suggestive. If you can think of an activity that relates
better to students’ own life, please feel free to replace our suggestion
with yours. ACTIVITY
Glossary of unfamiliar words or concepts comes at the end of a chapter.
Such a word appears in pink when it is used for the first time. Please
encourage the students to refer to the glossary and learn to use the word
in a different context. But there is no need for them to memorise the
definition given in the glossary.
GLOSSARY
Exercises come at the end of each chapter. You would notice that there are
exercises

many more questions here than used to be the case. You would also notice
that the questions are of a different kind. These questions do not test the
student’s ability to recall and reproduce what they have read in the Chapter.
Keeping in with the approach of the new NCF, we have asked questions
that require interpretation, application, analysis, and reasoning based on
what they have learnt in the Chapter. You would need to spend some time
with the students going over these exercises. Please feel free to come up
with new and better questions than suggested here and use those for
student evaluation.

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Let us read the newspaper is both an exercise and an activity. You can use
it to ensure that the students can apply what they have learnt to a different
context. You can also use it to encourage the habit of newspaper reading.
Where most students have access to news channels on television, you may
supplement or modify the projects suggested here to include watching of
news and current affair programmes. Here again, if you think a different
project will suit your students’ context and resources, you must be right.
Please go ahead.

ACCESSING ONLINE INFORMATION

We are living in an era of information and communication revolution. Printed books, textbooks
and the mass media such as newspapers and periodicals have ceased to be the only sources
of information. Now millions of websites (World Wide Web) provide easy and instant access
to a vast and diverse amount of online information. The World Wide Web has enabled a sudden
and extreme decentralisation of information. Since many schools do not possess the latest
encyclopaedias and traditional libraries, students and teachers may rely on the Internet to
access the needed information.
While using this textbook, the teachers and students may sometimes feel that information
provided in the book is, ‘insufficient’ for learning or classroom teaching. You may want to
know more about certain ideas, concepts and events in different countries. We would suggest
some of the ways you can use the Internet for this purpose.
You may find some information in free encyclopaedias like www.en.wikipedia.org or
www.britannica.com Search engines like Google and Yahoo can provide links to websites
that are specifically dedicated to different topics that you may be interested in.
Similarly, several important newspapers and magazines are available online. Some of
them allow you to access their archives without payments and registrations. Similarly a few
TV channels also allow you to access information without registrations and payments.
Some other websites would be useful to know more about the various institutions
discussed in the text. You could find the links to all the Indian government institutional websites
from www.india.gov.in. Specifically http://india.gov.in/directories_gov.php will provide you
the direct link to various institutions. Similarly various international organisations such as
United Nations, International Monetary Fund (IMF),World Bank, human rights organisations
such as National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) too have their own websites. Apart
from Indian constitution you will also find constitutions of many countries also being available
online. You can also look at parliaments around the world by following the link from Inter
Parliamentary Union www.ipu.org/english/home.htm
Further you may want to use more images, pictures, or cartoons for discussions. You
will find them in newspapers that are available online. Apart from it, you could also look at
www.politicalcartoons.com for this purpose. Similarly, through searching “images” category
of Google you could locate them.
You may find it useful to visit the websites like www.plato.standford.edu,
www.opendemocracy.net, www.brainyencyclopeid.com especially when you wish to get
more clarity on certain theoretical aspects or to learn more about politics.

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REQUEST FOR FEEDBACK

How did you like this textbook? What was your experience in reading or using this? What were
the difficulties you faced? What changes would you like to see in the next version of this book?
Write to us on all these and any other matter related to this textbook. You could be a teacher, a
parent, a student or just a general reader. We value any and every feedback.

Please write to:

Coordinator (Political Science)
Department of Education in Social Sciences (DESS)
NCERT
Sri Aurobindo Marg, New Delhi 110016.

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TEXTBOOK DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE
CHAIRPERSON, ADVISORY COMMITTEE FOR TEXTBOOKS AT THE SECONDARY LEVEL
Hari Vasudevan, Professor, Department of History, University of Calcutta,
Kolkata.

CHIEF ADVISORS
Yogendra Yadav, Senior Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies,
Delhi
Suhas Palshikar, Professor, Department of Politics and Public Administration,
University of Pune, Maharashtra

ADVISOR
K.C. Suri, Professor, Nagarjuna University, Guntur, Andhra Pradesh

MEMBERS
Alex M. George, Independent Researcher, Eruvatty, District Kannur, Kerala
Amman Madan, Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social
Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh
Malini Ghose, Nirantar, Centre for Gender and Education, New Delhi
Manish Jain, PGT, currently doctoral student, Department of Education,
University of Delhi, Delhi
Muzaffar Assadi, Professor, Department of Political Science, Mysore University,
Manasgangothri, Karnataka
Niraja Gopal Jayal, Professor, Centre for the Study of Law and Governance,
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
Pankaj Pushkar, Lecturer, Directorate of Higher Education, Government of
Uttaranchal, Dehradun
Sabyasachi Basu Roychowdhary, Professor, Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata

MEMBER-COORDINATOR
Sanjay Dubey, Reader, DESSH, NCERT, New Delhi

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We also acknowledge the contributions of the following members — Anju

Anand, PGT, G. M. Public School, R. K. Puram Sector VII, New Delhi; Amit,
Adharshila School, Village Sakal, Post Office Chatali, District Badwani,
Madhya Pradesh; A. Kamakshi, J. S. S. Public School, Banashankari,
Bangalore, Karnataka; Arvind Mohan, Associate Editor, Dainik Hindustan,
Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi; Anuradha Sen, PG Teacher, Springdales
School, Dhaula Kuan, New Delhi; P. Jisha, Noble Public School, Manjeri,
District Malapuram, Kerala; Ram Murthy, Independent Researcher and
Teacher, Nangal Slangri, District Una, Himachal Pradesh; Madan Sahani,
PGT, Government Senior Secondary School, R. K. Puram Sector VII, New
Delhi; Usha Rani T ripathy, PGT, Kendriya Vidyalaya, Bollaram,
Secunderabad, Andhra Pradesh; Yame Pertin, PGT, Government Higher
Secondary School, Doimukh, Itanagar, Arunachal Pradesh. Srimathi
Subbarao, SST Teacher, BGS International School, Nityananda Bangalore.
Thanks are also due to Cagle Cartoons for providing copyrights of the
cartoons of Angel Boligan, Patrick Chappatte, Stephane Peray, Ares, Emad
Hajjaj, Nerilicon, John Trever, Eric Allie, Simanca, M.E. Cohen.
We are also thankful to La Nacion (Chile), South Africa History Online,
GCMMF India, Shagun Jaat (Jabalpur) and PIB (India) for providing us
photographs or images.
We are specially grateful to Shankar, R.K. Laxman, Mario Miranda and
Harish Chandra Shukla (Kaak) for allowing us to use their cartoons. And
special thanks are due to Devyani Onial for her inputs in copy-editing.
The contribution of M.V.S.V. Prasad, Assistant Professor, Department
of Curriculum Studies, NCERT, in reviewing and updating the current
edition is appreciated.

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Foreword iii
A Letter for You v
How to Use this Book? vii

CHAPTER 1
WHAT IS DEMOCRACY? 1
WHY DEMOCRACY?
CHAPTER 2
CONSTITUTIONAL DESIGN 18

CHAPTER 3
ELECTORAL POLITICS 34

CHAPTER 4
WORKING OF INSTITUTIONS 56

CHAPTER 5
DEMOCRATIC RIGHTS 74

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