Timeline
25 June 1975
State of Kerala, 1973, established the Basic Structure doctrine by a 7-6 majority"; on emergency powers, "the National Emergency proclaimed under Article 352…
1 January 2015
For UPSC Governance, instances range from the Right to Information Act 2005 and the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act 2013 to the formation of NITI Aayog on .
Positions at a glance
Supporters
In practice, high-scoring scripts deploy dated instances as topic-sentence support and as concluding illustrations. For CSS Pakistan Affairs, candidates marshal instances such as the Objectives Resolution of 1949, the One Unit scheme of 1955, the 18th Amendment of 2010, and the Charter of Democracy signed in London in 2006. For UPSC Governance, instances range from the Right to Information Act 2005 and the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act 2013 to the formation of NITI Aayog on 1 January 2015. The 2026 examination cycle continues to emphasise contemporary anchoring, so candidates are expected to update their stock with recent events — legislative amendments, commission reports, and treaty actions — alongside the canonical historical set.
Opponents
The technique works by pairing a thesis with at least one chronologically fixed proof. The strongest instances combine four elements — the year, the named authority or actor, the instrument or event, and the outcome. Thus, on judicial review, a candidate writes "Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala, 1973, established the Basic Structure doctrine by a 7-6 majority"; on emergency powers, "the National Emergency proclaimed under Article 352 on 25 June 1975"; on international law, "UN Security Council Resolution 1973 (2011) authorising a no-fly zone over Libya." Dated instances also discipline the writer against vague temporal phrases like "recently" or "in the past," which weaken analytical precision. Where an exact date is uncertain, the disciplined approach is to cite the decade or the governing statute rather than fabricate a year, because a wrong date damages credibility more than an omitted one.
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In a 2023 UPSC Mains answer on cooperative federalism, a candidate cited the formation of the GST Council under Article 279A in 2016 as a dated instance, earning credit for converting an abstract claim into verifiable evidence.
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