Indian Politics Trivia
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50 free Indian Politics trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
India's politics runs on a constitution long enough to fill a small suitcase, a parliament that once sat past midnight to launch a tax, and elections so large that the voting has to happen in phases. The rules were settled in 1950, but the arguments over them have never stopped. These 50 questions cover the Constitution and the amendments that reshaped it, the two houses of Parliament and the offices above them, the prime ministers who held power and the ones who lost it within days, the parties and the symbols they fight under, the machinery of elections, the making of new states, and the Supreme Court judgments every law student learns first. Every answer comes with a short explanation of why it matters. It suits a school or college civics round, a UPSC warm-up, a pub quiz, or anyone who wants to follow the headlines from Delhi. Play it on your phone with instant answers, or print it for the table.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Prime Minister declared the 1975 Emergency after being unseated by the Allahabad High Court?
Indira Gandhi
Indira Gandhi's Emergency, from 1975 to 1977, saw opposition leaders jailed. A judge had found her guilty of misusing government machinery in her 1971 campaign.
Q 02Which two banknotes did India void overnight on 8 November 2016, cancelling about 86% of the cash in circulation?
₹500 and ₹1,000
The ₹500 and ₹1,000 notes were declared invalid from midnight in a televised address, with new ₹500 and ₹2,000 notes issued in their place. Queues formed outside banks for weeks as people swapped the old paper.
Q 03Which party, formed from the 2011 anti-corruption protests, won 67 of Delhi's 70 seats in 2015 under a broom symbol?
Aam Aadmi
The Aam Aadmi Party, 'Common Man Party', was launched by Arvind Kejriwal on 26 November 2012 after he and Anna Hazare parted ways over entering politics; the Election Commission approved its broom for the 2013 Delhi poll.
Q 04Which ballot option, ordered by the Supreme Court in 2013, lets Indian voters formally reject every candidate on offer?
NOTA
NOTA, short for 'none of the above', is only a protest in parliamentary polls: the candidate with the most votes still wins.
Q 05Which device, first tried in a 1982 by-election in Kerala, was used in all 543 Lok Sabha constituencies by 2004?
Electronic voting machine
India's electronic voting machine made its debut at Paravur in Kerala in May 1982, and the 2004 general election was the first fought entirely on the machines. Paper ballots had been the rule since the first poll of 1951–52.
Q 06Which Prime Minister governed for ten years from the upper house after losing a Lok Sabha contest in 1999?
Manmohan Singh
Manmohan Singh represented Assam in Parliament's upper house from 1991, the year he became the finance minister behind India's economic reforms.
Q 07Which provision, the source of Jammu and Kashmir's special status, was rendered inoperative in August 2019?
Article 370
Article 370 had limited which parts of the Indian Constitution applied in Jammu and Kashmir; the 2019 order applied all of it, and Parliament then split the state into two union territories, born on 31 October 2019.
Q 08Which tax did India introduce on 1 July 2017?
Goods and Services Tax
The Goods and Services Tax was once due to start in 2010 but was delayed for seven years before replacing levies such as VAT and octroi.
Q 09Which city, planned by Le Corbusier, is a union territory that serves as the capital of both Punjab and Haryana?
Chandigarh
Chandigarh was built because Partition left Punjab's old capital, Lahore, in Pakistan, and it became a shared capital when Haryana was carved out of Punjab in 1966. Its Capitol Complex is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Q 10Which Himalayan monarchy voted by 97.55% in a 1975 referendum to abolish its king and become a state of India?
Sikkim
Sikkim's Chogyal had ruled a protectorate of India; after the April 1975 vote a constitutional amendment made the kingdom India's 22nd state within weeks and abolished the Chogyal's office. Turnout was put at about 63 per cent.
Q 11Who became India's first non-Congress Prime Minister in 1977, taking the job at 81, the oldest ever to do so?
Morarji Desai
Morarji Desai had been jailed when the Emergency was declared in 1975 and was freed only in January 1977, two months before he took office.
Q 12Which former governor of Rajasthan took office in 2007 as India's first woman President?
Pratibha Patil
Pratibha Patil was put forward as a compromise candidate after the ruling alliance's left-wing parties could not agree on other names.
Q 13Which philosopher-president's 5 September birthday has been marked as Teachers' Day in India at his own suggestion?
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
Q 21Which party, founded by Mamata Banerjee in 1998, ended 34 years of Left Front rule in West Bengal in 2011?
Trinamool Congress
Trinamool Congress won so heavily in 2011 that the Left Front chief minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, lost his own seat; the party had won seven Lok Sabha seats in its first election, in 1998.
Q 22Which party did the cartoonist Bal Thackeray found in Bombay on 19 June 1966 as a Marathi regionalist movement?
Shiv Sena
Shiv Sena grew out of Marmik, the satirical cartoon weekly Thackeray had begun publishing in 1960; his nephew Raj later broke away to found the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, while his son Uddhav succeeded him as party chief.
Q 23Which Tamil Nadu party, founded by Annadurai in 1949, has a rising sun as its election symbol?
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, India's second President, told students who wanted to celebrate his birthday that it would be his 'proud privilege' if the day honoured teachers instead. He had held the Spalding chair at Oxford before politics.
Q 14Which house of India's Parliament cannot be dissolved, its members serving staggered six-year terms?
Rajya Sabha
The Rajya Sabha voted down the anti-terror bill POTA in 2002, so the government passed it at a rare joint sitting, where the larger Lok Sabha held sway.
Q 15Which office, filled by a vote of MPs alone, carries the ex officio chairmanship of India's upper house?
Vice President
The Vice President took over as acting President when President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed died in office.
Q 16Which state, formed on 2 June 2014, covers the Telugu-speaking districts of the former princely state of Hyderabad?
Telangana
Telangana's statehood was set in motion by the TRS founder's 2009 fast-unto-death, which got the central government to start forming the state within two weeks; he became its first chief minister.
Q 17Which 2005 law lets any citizen demand records from a public authority, which must reply within 30 days?
Right to Information Act
The Right to Information Act grew out of a campaign by rural workers in Rajasthan who were fighting to be paid minimum wages.
Q 18Which 2005 scheme guaranteed 100 days of paid manual work a year to any rural household whose adults asked for it?
MGNREGA
MGNREGA was hailed by the government as 'the largest and most ambitious social security and public works program in the world', yet in practice households averaged about 45 days of work, not 100.
Q 19Which anti-corruption ombudsman, demanded by Anna Hazare's 2011 fast in Delhi, was finally created by a 2013 Act?
Lokpal
The Lokpal bill had been introduced and dropped repeatedly since 1968 before it passed on 18 December 2013; the body can investigate even a sitting Prime Minister. Its state-level counterparts are called Lokayuktas.
Q 20Which elephant-symbol party, founded by Kanshi Ram in 1984, made Mayawati chief minister of Uttar Pradesh?
Bahujan Samaj
The Bahujan Samaj Party first kept Mayawati in office through short-lived coalitions from 1995, then won Uttar Pradesh on its own in 2007.
DMK
DMK began as a breakaway from Periyar's Dravidar Kazhagam, and Annadurai was still its general secretary when he died in 1969.
Q 24Which BJP-led coalition, formed in May 1998, ran the first non-Congress government to serve a full five-year term?
National Democratic Alliance
The National Democratic Alliance's first government lost a confidence vote by a single vote in April 1999, but it won that year's election with a larger majority and served the full term.
Q 25Which formation, launched in January 1977 by merging the main opposition groups, ended Congress's 30-year rule?
Janata Party
The Janata Party absorbed the Jana Sangh and the Bharatiya Lok Dal, its constituents dissolving their separate identities to fight the post-Emergency election; by 1980 the Jana Sangh members had left to form the BJP.
Q 26Which 1973 ruling, argued over 68 days before 13 judges, put the Constitution's basic structure beyond Parliament?
Kesavananda Bharati case
The Kesavananda Bharati case began with the head of Edneer Matha, a Kerala monastery, fighting land-reform laws; a dissenting judge was then made Chief Justice over three senior judges from the majority.
Q 27Which 1976 rewrite, nicknamed the 'Mini-Constitution', added 'socialist' and 'secular' to the Preamble?
42nd Amendment
The 42nd Amendment also changed 'unity of the nation' to 'unity and integrity of the nation', bound the President to cabinet advice and put itself beyond judicial review, a part the Supreme Court struck down in Minerva Mills in 1980.
Q 28Which 1985 addition to the Constitution curbed 'Aaya Ram, Gaya Ram' party-hopping by disqualifying defectors?
Tenth Schedule
The Tenth Schedule came in through the 52nd Amendment, and the phrase it targets mocks Gaya Lal, a Haryana legislator who switched parties three times in 1967.
Q 29Which Prime Minister, the first from south India, led the minority government that liberalised the economy in 1991?
P. V. Narasimha Rao
P. V. Narasimha Rao had very nearly retired from politics in 1991 when the job fell to him, and the reforms his government began in a balance-of-payments crisis have been kept by every successor. A polyglot, he spoke 17 languages.
Q 30Which Prime Minister implemented the Mandal Commission's job quotas for backward castes in 1990, igniting protests?
V. P. Singh
V. P. Singh's government fell within months of the announcement, but in 1992 the Supreme Court upheld the 27 per cent quota he had brought in.