BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 3 Sociology 2024-25 - ATKT Set 2 75/25 Question Paper with Solutions

The distinction is Robert K. Merton's.

Manifest functions are the consequences of a social practice that are intended and recognised by the participants. The manifest function of a school is to teach; of a court, to decide guilt; of a rain dance, to bring rain.

Latent functions are consequences that are unintended and unrecognised. The latent functions of a school include supervising children while parents work, forming friendship and marriage networks, and delaying entry to the labour market. Merton's example is the Hopi rain dance, whose latent function is to reinforce group solidarity whether or not rain follows.

Merton added dysfunctions, consequences that damage the system.

Role conflict arises when a person occupies two or more statuses whose roles make incompatible demands at the same time. The clash is between roles: a woman who is both judge and mother, called to court on the morning her child is ill.

Role strain arises within a single role, when the several obligations of that one role pull against each other. The clash is inside one role: an advocate's single role requires both zealous advocacy for the client and a duty of candour to the court.

In one line: role conflict is between two hats, role strain is inside one hat.

Social interaction is the reciprocal process by which people act and react towards one another. Its types are associative and dissociative.

Associative or integrative processes, which draw people together:

1. Cooperation, working together for a common end.
2. Accommodation, adjusting to a conflict without settling it, by compromise, arbitration, toleration or conversion.
3. Assimilation, the slow fusion of two groups into one culture.

Dissociative or disintegrative processes, which drive people apart:

1. Competition, an impersonal struggle for a scarce reward in which the rival is not the target.
2. Conflict, a deliberate, personal struggle to defeat the opponent.

Social disorganisation is the breakdown of the normal working of a society, in which its institutions fail to perform their functions and its norms lose their hold. Its main causes are:

1. Rapid social change and cultural lag, where material culture outruns non material culture.
2. Industrialisation and urbanisation, which uproot people from the joint family and the village and weaken informal control.
3. Migration and mobility, which mix populations with different norms.
4. Conflicting values and the decline of shared norms, producing anomie in Durkheim's sense.
5. Faulty socialisation and the weakening of primary groups, above all the family.
6. War, disaster and economic depression, which destroy institutions abruptly.

4. Tribal and ethnic: more than 700 Scheduled Tribes.
5. Regional: differences of dress, food, festival, architecture and kinship rule. South Indian cross cousin marriage and north Indian village exogamy are opposite rules within one country.
6. Rural and urban, and wide differences of class.

Bases of unity. Geographical unity; a long shared civilisation with common epics and pilgrimage routes; the composite culture produced by centuries of interaction in language, music, architecture and food; a common constitutional order, single citizenship, an integrated judiciary and all India services; the freedom movement as a shared experience; and the commitments to secularism and federalism.

Threats. Communalism; casteism; linguistic chauvinism; regionalism; ethnocentrism; majoritarianism, which converts a numerical majority into a claim of cultural ownership; and terrorism and insurgency.

For full marks, cover: the definition, characteristics, forms, rules of mate selection, functions, and the changes visible today.

Definition. Marriage is the socially approved union of a man and a woman which establishes a family, regulates sexual relations and descent, and creates reciprocal rights and duties. Westermarck: "Marriage is a relation of one or more men to one or more women which is recognised by custom or law."

Characteristics. It is a universal institution; it is socially approved, and approval is what distinguishes it from cohabitation; it creates reciprocal rights and obligations; it is marked by ceremony; it is intended to endure; and it is regulated by rules of endogamy, exogamy and prohibited degrees.

Forms.

• Monogamy: one man with one woman at a time, the most widespread form. Serial monogamy is remarriage after death or divorce.

For full marks, cover: the meaning, the characteristics of a profession, the structure and internal stratification of the Indian bar, its functions, its problems, and its regulation.

Meaning. The sociology of the legal profession studies lawyers as an occupational group: how the profession is organised, how entry is controlled, how it is stratified internally, what functions it performs, how it is regulated, and how it relates to power and to social change.

Characteristics of a profession. A specialised body of theoretical knowledge acquired by long formal training; a licence and a monopoly over the work; a code of ethics and self regulation; an ideal of service above profit; autonomy of judgment; and an association that represents and disciplines the members.

Structure in India. Governed by the Advocates Act, 1961, which created one unified class, advocates, abolishing the earlier grades of vakil, pleader and attorney. The Bar Council of India and the State Bar Councils control enrolment, conduct and legal education. Senior Advocates are designated under Section 16.

Problems. Pendency and delay; the cost of litigation, which makes Article 39A partly formal; unequal access and the concentration of competent counsel in the metros; the quality and regulation of legal education; strikes and boycotts by lawyers, held illegal in Ex-Capt. Harish Uppal v. Union of India (2003); touting and unethical practice; gender disparity in the senior bar and on the bench; and the tension between the service ideal and commercialisation.

Regulation. The Advocates Act, 1961; the Bar Council of India Rules on professional conduct; disciplinary proceedings under Section 35 for professional misconduct; and the contempt jurisdiction.

Agencies. The family, the primary and most important; the peer group, the first setting of equality; the school, which trains the child in impersonal authority as well as in knowledge; religion; the workplace; and mass and social media, increasingly powerful and largely unregulated.

Theories of the self.

• Cooley's looking glass self: we see ourselves as we imagine others see us, in three steps, our imagination of our appearance to another, of that person's judgment, and the resulting pride or shame.
• Mead: the self arises in interaction through language, from play, taking one role at a time, to the game, coordinating many roles, to the generalised other, the internalised attitude of the community; and the spontaneous I is distinguished from the socialised me.
• Freud: personality is the struggle between id, superego and ego.

Importance. It transmits culture and makes society continuous; it forms personality and the capacity for self control; it teaches the roles society needs performed; and it is the foundation of social control, because an internalised norm is obeyed without supervision.

(ii) Suggest remedial Measures for removing Communalism.

Communalism is the ideology that a religious community forms a distinct political interest opposed to that of other communities, and that loyalty to it overrides loyalty to the wider society. A communal riot is collective violence between religious communities.

(i) Role of society and law in curbing communal riots

Society.

1. Education and socialisation, through textbooks that present the composite history of India and schools that are not segregated by community.

2. Penal law: Sections 153A, 153B, 295A, 298 and 505 of the Indian Penal Code, now carried into the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, and Sections 141 to 149 on unlawful assembly and common object.
3. Preventive powers: Sections 129 to 132 and Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code.
4. Accountability of the administration, and action against officers who fail to act.
5. Commissions of inquiry, special investigation teams and transfer of trials where a fair trial is impossible, as ordered in Zahira Habibullah Sheikh v. State of Gujarat.
6. Compensation and rehabilitation of victims.
7. Regulation of hate speech, including under the Representation of the People Act, 1951, which makes an appeal to religion a corrupt practice.

(ii) Remedial measures for removing communalism

1. Educational reform: a common syllabus presenting composite culture, comparative religion, and removal of communal content from textbooks.
2. Economic development and employment, since communal mobilisation feeds on insecurity and unemployed young men are the raw material of riots.

A note on the premise. The description is accurate of the traditional caste system and of its ritual rules today, with one qualification. Caste has never been wholly static: Sanskritisation, described by M. N. Srinivas, allowed groups to raise their standing over generations by adopting the practices of higher castes, and dominant castes rose through land and numbers. What was closed was individual mobility, not group mobility.

(i) Role of education in social change

1. It attacks the belief on which caste rests. Caste is justified by doctrines of ritual purity and pollution and by karma. Education substitutes rational and scientific explanation, and a hierarchy that cannot be justified is harder to enforce.

Limitations. Education also reproduces inequality: unequal school quality, the cost of higher education, the language barrier, dropout among the poorest, and caste discrimination inside institutions. It is a necessary condition of social change, not a sufficient one.

(ii) Remedies for inter caste marriage and social mobility

For inter caste marriage:

1. Legal facilitation: the Special Marriage Act, 1954, which permits marriage across caste and religion without conversion, and the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, which does not treat caste as a bar.
2. Protection of couples: Lata Singh v. State of U.P. (2006), holding that an adult may marry whom she chooses and directing police protection; Shakti Vahini v. Union of India (2018), holding the right to choose a partner to be part of Article 21 and issuing preventive, remedial and punitive directions against khap panchayats, including safe houses and special cells in each district; and Shafin Jahan v. Asokan K. M. (2018), restoring a marriage annulled by a High Court.
3. Prosecution of honour crimes without compromise, and accountability of officials who fail to protect.

6. Access to credit and entrepreneurship, building an economic base independent of state employment.
7. Political representation, including reservation in panchayats under the 73rd Amendment.
8. Abolition of surviving untouchability in practice, particularly manual scavenging, prohibited by the 2013 Act.

1. The family, the first and strongest. Differential treatment begins at birth: different toys, clothes, play and freedom of movement. Girls are trained in nurture, obedience and domestic skill, boys in assertion and achievement. In many Indian households the difference extends to food, health care and schooling, which is measurable in nutrition data and in the sex ratio.
2. Language, through proverbs, forms of address and gendered occupational nouns. A girl told repeatedly that she must one day go to another house learns that her present home is provisional.
3. The school: textbook illustrations in which mothers cook and fathers work; the steering of boys towards science and girls towards arts and home science; unequal access to playgrounds; different disciplinary standards.
4. The peer group, which enforces gender conformity by ridicule more effectively than adults do.
5. Religion and ritual, prescribing distinct duties and in places distinct exclusions.
6. Mass media and advertising, representing women as decorative, domestic or dependent.
7. The workplace, continuing the process through occupational segregation.

3. Domestic labour is unpaid work that subsidises the economy, reproducing the labour force at no cost to the employer, and going uncounted because it is unpaid.
4. Ideology conceals the arrangement. Custom, religion and the language of honour and protection present a power relation as a natural order. This is false consciousness applied to gender.
5. Law has historically been an instrument of the arrangement and only recently a corrective: unequal inheritance, restitution of conjugal rights, and the marital rape exception.
6. Change comes through struggle: the women's movement, litigation, agitation and legislation won by pressure.

Contrast with functionalism. Parsons argued that the sexual division of labour is functional, the man performing the instrumental role of provider and the woman the expressive role of nurture, and that the specialisation stabilises the family. The conflict reply is that this describes the arrangement and calls it necessary, ignores who benefits, and treats a historically specific mid twentieth century household as a universal type.

1. Weak internal checks. Where legislatures, courts, a free press and an opposition function, they constrain executive adventure. Where they are hollow, nothing stands between a decision and its execution. This is a failure of legal rational authority: institutions present in form and absent in function.
2. Failure of the international order. The Security Council could not act because a permanent member was itself the party, and the veto paralysed the only organ with binding power. Collective security failed exactly where it was designed to work.
3. Failure of the institutions of prevention: diplomacy, treaty guarantees, arms control and regional security arrangements.
4. Structural causes beyond any individual: the unsettled aftermath of the Soviet Union's disintegration, competition between blocs, alliance expansion, internal ethnic and linguistic division, energy dependence and territorial and resource interest.

4. Humanitarian relief through UNHCR, WFP, UNICEF, WHO and OCHA, which has been the UN's most substantial contribution in this conflict, together with the Black Sea Grain Initiative brokered with Turkey in 2022.
5. Norm setting and condemnation through the General Assembly, where no veto exists, which passed resolutions demanding withdrawal by large majorities.
6. International justice: the International Court of Justice between states, the International Criminal Court for individual responsibility, and commissions of inquiry under the Human Rights Council.
7. Nuclear safety, here through the IAEA at Zaporizhzhia.

Limitations. The veto disables the Council whenever a great power is a party. It has no standing army and depends on members for troops and money. Only Chapter VII resolutions bind, and enforcement depends on the political will of the same states. This is the background to the demand for Security Council reform, including India's claim to a permanent seat.

Conclusion. The UN's realistic role in a conflict of this kind is to contain, relieve and record: humanitarian corridors, refugee protection, grain agreements, documentation of violations, and a forum in which aggression is named. That is a real function and far less than the Charter promised.

For full marks, cover: the definition of religion and its elements, the theories, evolutionary, functionalist, conflict and Weberian, the functions and dysfunctions of the religious institution, and the constitutional position in India.

Definition and elements

Religion is a system of beliefs and practices relating to sacred things which unites its adherents into a moral community. Durkheim: "Religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say things set apart and forbidden, beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a church all those who adhere to them."

Elements. Belief in the supernatural; the division of the world into sacred and profane; ritual and worship; a moral code; sacred objects, places and texts; emotion of awe and dependence; a community of believers; and often a priesthood.

Theories of religion

1. Evolutionary theories.

2. The functionalist theory (Durkheim). In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life Durkheim studied Australian totemism and concluded that the totem is a symbol of the clan, so that in worshipping the totem the clan worships itself. Religion's essential function is social integration: it creates and renews the collective conscience. Ritual assembles people, generates collective effervescence, and returns them with their common identity refreshed. Malinowski added that religion relieves anxiety where human control fails, at death, illness and the start of a dangerous undertaking.

3. The conflict theory (Marx). Religion belongs to the superstructure, determined by the economic base and serving the ruling class. It is "the sigh of the oppressed creature... the opium of the people": it consoles the exploited with reward hereafter, explains present suffering as ordained, and so produces false consciousness and prevents class consciousness. In India the doctrines of karma and rebirth are cited as performing exactly this function for caste, since they explain a low birth as deserved.

Criticism. Religion has also been revolutionary: the Bhakti and Sufi movements, liberation theology, Ambedkar's Buddhist conversion, and the black churches of the American civil rights movement.

7. Welfare and charity: schools, hospitals, langars and relief.
8. Legitimation of the social order, conferring sanctity on marriage, kingship and property.
9. Social change, through reform movements: Bhakti, Buddhism's rejection of caste, the Brahmo and Arya Samaj, and Ambedkar's conversion.

Dysfunctions. Communal conflict; obstruction of reform and of science; legitimation of caste and of the subordination of women; superstition, commercialisation and exploitation by self styled godmen; fundamentalism and intolerance; and diversion of resources into ritual.

For full marks, cover: Weber's place in the discipline, his definition of sociology and verstehen, the ideal type, social action and its four types, authority and its three types, bureaucracy, the Protestant ethic, the three dimensional theory of stratification, rationalisation and disenchantment, his study of India, and an assessment.

Place in the discipline

Max Weber (1864 to 1920), German jurist, economist and sociologist, is with Marx and Durkheim one of the three founders of modern sociology. He trained in law, and that training runs through everything he wrote. His principal works are The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), Economy and Society, published posthumously, and the comparative studies in the sociology of religion including The Religion of India.

1. Zweckrational, goal rational action: the most efficient means chosen for a chosen end, with ends themselves weighed. An investor selecting a portfolio.
2. Wertrational, value rational action: an end pursued because it is right, regardless of consequence. An advocate who will not mislead the court in order to win.
3. Affective, determined by emotion.
4. Traditional, determined by settled habit.

The first two are rational, the last two are not, and Weber's historical thesis is that modernity consists in the steady displacement of the last two by the first.

4. Authority and its three types

Power is the probability of carrying out one's will despite resistance. Authority is legitimate domination.

1. Traditional authority, legitimated by immemorial custom: a hereditary monarch, a caste elder. Its administrative forms are patrimonialism and feudalism.

He held it technically superior to every other form of organisation, as machine production is to handicraft, in precision, speed, consistency and predictability. He was equally clear about its costs: the iron cage of rationality; red tape and ritualism, where following the rule displaces achieving the purpose; the reduction of the official to a cog; and the danger that a permanent expert bureaucracy escapes the control of the temporary politicians meant to direct it.

6. The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism

Weber observed that capital ownership, entrepreneurship and skilled labour in the Europe of his day were disproportionately Protestant, and asked why. Calvinist predestination holds that salvation is fixed in advance and cannot be earned, which produces intense anxiety. Relief was sought in worldly asceticism: methodical work in a calling, success read as a sign of election, and the renunciation of luxury. Hard work plus prohibition of consumption leaves only reinvestment, which is capital accumulation arrived at as a by product of religious anxiety. The wider argument is against economic determinism: ideas can be causes, not merely reflections.

7. Stratification: class, status and party

Weber accepted Marx's economic dimension and added two:

9. The Religion of India

Weber applied comparison to India to test the Protestant ethic thesis by contrast, arguing that Hinduism, with karma, rebirth and dharma, and the caste order with hereditary occupations and ritual restrictions on contact and exchange, produced an other worldly orientation and an ethic of duty within a fixed station, which did not generate the methodical, this worldly, accumulative conduct capitalism required. The argument has been criticised for relying on texts rather than practice, for underestimating Indian commercial and banking traditions, and for reading caste as more rigid than it was, but it founded the comparative sociology of religion.

Assessment

Contributions. He established the interpretative tradition against positivism; gave sociology the ideal type; produced the analysis of authority and bureaucracy that political sociology still uses; showed that ideas can be causes; and supplied the multidimensional model of stratification that fits complex societies.

For full marks, cover: how the three categories are constitutionally defined, the problems of each in turn, the common problems, and the constitutional, legislative and judicial measures with an assessment.

The categories

Scheduled Castes are the castes historically subjected to untouchability, specified by Presidential order under Article 341, about 16.6 per cent of the population by the 2011 Census. Scheduled Tribes are communities marked by distinctive culture, geographical isolation, shyness of contact and economic backwardness, specified under Article 342, about 8.6 per cent. Other Backward Classes are the socially and educationally backward classes of Articles 15(4) and 16(4), identified by the Mandal Commission (1979 to 1980), whose recommendation of 27 per cent reservation in central services was implemented in 1990 and upheld with conditions in Indra Sawhney v. Union of India (1992). The 102nd Amendment (2018) gave constitutional status to the National Commission for Backward Classes through Article 338B, and the 105th Amendment (2021) restored the power of states to identify their own backward classes.

8. Poor access to justice, with reluctance to register cases and low conviction rates.
9. Psychological effects: internalised inferiority, and what Ambedkar described as the destruction of self respect.

Problems of Scheduled Tribes

1. Land alienation, the gravest problem, through debt, fraud and non enforcement of protective legislation despite the Fifth Schedule.
2. Displacement by development projects: dams, mines, industry and protected areas. Tribals are a small fraction of the population and a large fraction of those displaced since independence.
3. Indebtedness and bonded labour, despite the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976.
4. Loss of forest rights, which forest law converted into encroachment; the Forest Rights Act, 2006, was enacted to correct what its own preamble calls a "historical injustice", and its implementation is uneven.
5. Poverty, malnutrition and poor health, with the worst indicators of any group on infant and maternal mortality, anaemia and sickle cell disease.

4. Internal inequality within the category, the sharpest current problem, with dominant OBC groups capturing a disproportionate share of the benefit and the Most Backward Classes left untouched. This is why the Rohini Commission was appointed in 2017 to examine sub categorisation.
5. Absence of reliable data, since caste other than SC and ST has not been enumerated in the census since 1931.
6. The creamy layer, excluded under Indra Sawhney, and the practical difficulty of applying the test.

Common problems

Poverty and unemployment; discrimination in private employment, where reservation does not apply; the double disadvantage of women, who face caste, class and gender subordination together; inadequate representation in the higher judiciary, media, corporate sector and academia; unfilled backlog vacancies; and prejudice in forms law cannot easily reach.

Assessment. Reservation has produced a substantial middle class among Scheduled Castes and Tribes and changed the composition of public employment and legislatures. It has been least effective where beneficiaries were poorest, because it presupposes a qualification the very poor cannot acquire. It does not reach the private sector, now the larger employer. And it does not touch social discrimination, which no quota can reach. Reservation is a remedy for exclusion from institutions, not for prejudice, and land reform, education and enforcement of the criminal law matter at least as much.

Types

A. By number of partners.

1. Monogamy. One man with one woman at a time, the most widespread form and the only lawful form for Hindus, Christians and Parsis in India. Its advantages are emotional depth, better care of children, equality of the sexes and economic manageability. Serial monogamy is successive marriage after death or divorce; straight monogamy forbids remarriage even after death.

2. Polygamy, of three kinds:

• Polygyny, one man with two or more wives. Sororal (sororate) where the wives are sisters, on the theory that sisters quarrel less; non sororal where they are not. Causes: excess of women, desire for male offspring, the value of labour and children in an agrarian household, prestige and political alliance, and the barrenness or illness of the first wife. Found among the Naga, Gond and Baiga, and permitted with conditions in Muslim personal law, limited to four wives with a requirement of equal treatment.

Functions

Regulation of sexual behaviour; legitimate procreation and assignment of descent; rearing and socialisation of children; economic cooperation; emotional security and companionship; transmission of property, status and culture; and alliance between kin groups.

Changes in the institution

1. Rising age at marriage, in law under the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006, and in practice through education and employment.
2. From arranged to self chosen, with the intermediate "arranged love marriage", and matrimonial platforms replacing the caste network.
3. Weakening caste and community endogamy in cities, though it remains dominant nationally.
4. From sacrament to contract to companionship.
5. Rising divorce and remarriage, and growing acceptance of both.
6. Changing roles within marriage in dual earning households.
7. Nuclear residence replacing the joint household.
8. Smaller families, later childbearing, voluntary childlessness.

Conclusion. Marriage is changing rather than disappearing. Nearly all Indians still marry, and no other institution has assumed its irreplaceable functions of assigning legitimacy, descent and inheritance. What has changed is its basis, from family arrangement to individual choice, and its content, from an alliance organising property and labour to a partnership expected to deliver companionship. Law has moved consistently towards autonomy and equality between spouses; social practice has followed unevenly, fastest in the cities and slowest in the matter of caste endogamy.

4. It formulates laws and generalisations, probabilistic rather than absolute: Durkheim's demonstration that suicide rates vary inversely with social integration is one.
5. It predicts within limits: census projection, crime rate forecasting, election prediction.
6. It establishes cause and effect, as Durkheim did in linking religion, family and nationality to suicide.

Arguments against:

1. No laboratory experiment, since human beings cannot be isolated and manipulated, and there are ethical limits to trying.
2. Lack of objectivity, since the sociologist is part of the society he studies.
3. No exact measurement of attitudes, prestige, satisfaction or alienation.
4. Unreliable prediction, since behaviour is voluntary and reflexive: people change what they do when they learn what is predicted of them.
5. Imprecise terminology: community, culture and society are used differently by different writers.
6. Few universal laws, because social phenomena are bound to time and place.

• Weber: sociology interprets social behaviour, and its object is the interpretative understanding of social action.
• Criticism: form and content cannot be separated, since the same form means different things with different content; and no other social science studies these forms, so sociology cannot avoid content.

2. The synthetic school. Sociology is a general or synthesising science of society as a whole.

• Durkheim divided it into social morphology, the territorial and population base; social physiology, the specialised sociologies of religion, law, economy and morals; and general sociology, which formulates the general laws.
• Sorokin: the relationships between different classes of social phenomena and their general characteristics.
• Ginsberg: social morphology, social control, social processes and social pathology.
• Criticism: the field becomes so wide that sociology risks becoming a superficial survey of everything.

A reasonable position. The synthetic view has largely prevailed. Sociology studies society as a whole and works through specialised branches: sociology of law, family, religion, education, industry, medicine and crime.

8. The functional method, explaining an institution by its contribution to the working of the whole.
9. The ideal type (Weber), a deliberately constructed pure model used as a yardstick.