RAS question
Article 352 was amended by the 44th Amendment to replace 'internal disturbance' with:
Correct answer: (B) Armed rebellion.
The 44th Amendment replaced the phrase "internal disturbance" in Article 352 with "armed rebellion" as a ground for proclaiming a national emergency.
Explanation
Article 352 deals with a Proclamation of Emergency. The cited official text of the Constitution, issued by the Government of India, Ministry of Law and Justice, shows that the ground now reads "war or external aggression or armed rebellion" and records in the footnote that "armed rebellion" was substituted for "internal disturbance" by the Constitution (Forty-fourth Amendment) Act, 1978, with effect from 20 June 1979. This matches the exam explanation: after the experience of the 1975 Emergency, the amendment narrowed the internal ground for emergency powers. "Armed rebellion" is a stricter and more concrete threshold than the broader phrase "internal disturbance", reducing scope for misuse.
Why the other options are wrong
- (A) "Political crisis" is not the wording used in Article 352 after the 44th Amendment and would describe a general governmental situation, not the constitutional emergency ground.
- (C) "Civil unrest" is closer in tone to the old broad idea of internal disturbance, but the amendment deliberately chose the narrower phrase "armed rebellion".
- (D) "National emergency" is the result of a valid proclamation under Article 352, not the replacement phrase inserted for the ground of internal disturbance.
Concept
This tests Emergency provisions under the Indian Constitution, especially how the 44th Amendment tightened Article 352 after the 1975 Emergency. RAS repeatedly asks such amendment-based distinctions because they connect constitutional text with safeguards against executive misuse.