PYQ Vault · Paper 1 · Rights & Human Rights

Human Rights are complex and contested social practice that organises relations between individuals, society and the State. Comment.

How the answer moves

The flow snapshot — the routes in, the body, the counter-view and the routes out.

Flow snapshot — how the answer moves
Intro routes
| R1 reject "rights as moral possessions" → recast as a social practice born after WWII R2 the Holocaust ended absolute sovereignty — the individual placed at the centre of political morality
Body flow
| the practice reorders three relations → individual (Kant: dignity, an end not a means) → society (shared standards, coexistence among diverse ways of life) → State (sovereignty into duty; protector and violator) → complexity = moral + legal + political registers, across domestic, international, cultural
Counter-view
| contestation from the same root → Berlin (no single hierarchy of values) → Walzer, Spheres of Justice (justice rests on shared understandings and social practices; no one universal theory)
Conclusion routes
| R1 contestation flows from its practical character → it does not weaken them R2 keeps human dignity at the centre → among the most inspiring political ideas of the twentieth century

Model answer

Handwritten, in the form it would be written in the examination hall.

Handwritten model answer — UPSC PSIR 2022, Rights & Human Rights