BPSC 131 key facts for the June 2026 solved question paper
- Course code: BPSC 131 (printed BPSC-131)
- Subject: Introduction to Political Theory
- Programme: Bachelor of Arts (General) (BAG), CBCS
- Credits: 6
- Blocks and units: 4 blocks, 14 units (eGyanKosh)
- Maximum marks: 100
- Duration: 3 hours
- Questions in the June 2026 paper: 8 (attempt 5, at least 2 from each section)
- Solved samples shown on this page: 2 (Q1 and Q2)
- Questions in the paid file: All 8 answered, including 6 not shown on this page
What the BPSC 131 Solved Question Paper June 2026 covers
BPSC 131 Solved Question Paper June 2026 is our answer file for BPSC 131 Introduction to Political Theory, the political science course of IGNOU’s Bachelor of Arts (General) programme (BAG). It takes the official June 2026 term-end paper and gives a complete, exam-length answer for each of its 8 questions.
The course asks you to handle ideas, not dates or numbers. You need to explain what thinkers such as Max Weber, Karl Marx, John Rawls and J. S. Mill actually argued, and then weigh their ideas. Our answers name each thinker’s key work and year, so your answer sounds informed rather than general.
This paper also rewards students who study past papers. The June 2026 question on Weber and legitimation is almost the same as Question 1 of June 2025, and Mill on liberty returns from the same session. The state and civil society question repeats from December 2025.
Two BPSC 131 answers in full, plus the six questions in the file
Below are complete answers to Q1 and Q2 from Section I; the remaining 6 questions are listed as printed and answered only in the full file. Both answers follow the paper’s instruction of about 400 words each.
These answers were written by our subject team for this page. Read them as a sample of the structure every answer in the file follows: an introduction, headed points, an evaluation that brings in critics, and a short conclusion.
Q1. What do you understand by legitimate use of power ? Write Max Weber’s views on legitimation.
Introduction. Power is the ability of one actor to make others act as he or she wishes. Max Weber defined it as the chance that a person in a social relationship can carry out his own will even against resistance. Power that rests only on force is costly and unstable. When the people who obey accept a command as rightful, power becomes legitimate, and political theory calls this legitimate power authority.
Meaning of legitimate use of power
Legitimacy is the belief among the ruled that rulers have a right to command and that they themselves have a duty to obey. In his 1919 lecture Politics as a Vocation, Weber described the modern state as a human community that successfully claims a monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a territory. The key word is legitimate: police, courts and armies use force, but under rules that citizens recognise as valid.
Weber’s three types of legitimation
In Economy and Society, Weber identified three pure types of legitimate authority, each resting on a different belief.
- Traditional authority rests on faith in the sanctity of age-old customs and in the status of those who rule under them. Hereditary kings, tribal chiefs and family patriarchs are examples. Obedience is owed to the person, not to written rules.
- Charismatic authority rests on devotion to the extraordinary qualities, heroism or exemplary character of an individual, such as a prophet or a revolutionary leader. It is unstable, and after the leader goes it is routinised into traditional or legal forms, a process Weber called the routinisation of charisma.
- Legal-rational authority rests on belief in the legality of enacted rules and in the right of officials appointed under those rules to issue commands. Obedience is owed to an impersonal office. Bureaucracy, with hierarchy, written rules, merit-based appointment and salaried officials, is its purest form.
Weber treated these as ideal types. Real states mix them. In India, the Prime Minister’s authority flows from the Constitution, a legal-rational source, yet popular leaders may also draw on personal charisma. Weber believed modern Western societies were moving steadily towards legal-rational rule.
Evaluation
Weber explains why most people obey without being forced, and his typology remains the starting point for studying authority. Critics say he reduced legitimacy to mere belief. David Beetham, in The Legitimation of Power (1991), argued that power is legitimate only when it follows established rules, when those rules can be justified by shared beliefs, and when there is evidence of consent. Marxists add that belief itself can be manufactured by the ruling class.
Conclusion. Legitimate use of power means power exercised with the acceptance of the governed. Weber’s traditional, charismatic and legal-rational types show that this acceptance can rest on custom, personality or law, and modern democracies depend most of all on the third.
Q2. Discuss Marxist idea of freedom.
Introduction. Liberal thinkers usually see freedom as the absence of external restraint, protected by rights to property, speech and contract. Marxists reject this as a formal or bourgeois freedom that is real only for those who own the means of production. For Karl Marx, freedom is not a private zone guarded from the state but the collective capacity of human beings to control the conditions of their own lives.
Marxist critique of liberal freedom
In On the Jewish Question (1843), Marx separated political emancipation from human emancipation. Equal rights and citizenship were real progress, yet the rights of man protected the isolated, self-interested individual cut off from the community. The right to property, in his view, was simply the right to pursue self-interest without regard to others.
Under capitalism, Marx argued in Capital (Volume I, 1867), the worker is legally at liberty to sell labour power to any employer, but having no means of production, must sell it in order to survive. Freedom of contract thus hides economic compulsion. The Communist Manifesto (1848) added that the modern state manages the common affairs of the bourgeoisie, so legal liberties mainly protect property.
Alienation as unfreedom
In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx described how wage labour alienates workers from the product they make, from the activity of work, from their own human essence and from other people. Unfreedom therefore begins in the sphere of production, not only in politics.
The positive Marxist idea of freedom
- Freedom means self-realisation through creative, meaningful labour rather than labour forced by need.
- Freedom is collective: the Manifesto pictures an association in which the development of each person is the condition for the development of all.
- Freedom rests on knowledge of necessity. Engels, in Anti-Dühring (1878), spoke of a leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.
- In Capital (Volume III), the realm of freedom begins where labour imposed by necessity ends, and shortening the working day is its basic precondition.
Real freedom therefore requires the abolition of private ownership of the means of production, the end of class division and, finally, the withering away of the state.
Evaluation
The Marxist view rightly ties freedom to material conditions and helped inspire social and economic rights in modern welfare states. Its critics are equally firm. Isaiah Berlin, in Two Concepts of Liberty (1958), warned that positive liberty can be used to justify coercion in the name of a person’s true self. The record of one-party communist states, which curtailed speech and dissent, strengthened this objection.
Conclusion. The Marxist idea of freedom moves from formal rights to real power over one’s life. It exposes the limits of liberal freedom in an unequal society, though critics fear its collective vision can sacrifice individual liberty.
Questions answered only in the full file
The questions below are printed exactly as they appear in the June 2026 paper. Their answers are not on this page.
- Section I, Q3. Describe John Rawls’ theory of justice.
- Section I, Q4. Why did the Constituent Assembly of India adopt the Parliamentary form of Democracy ? Describe its basic features.
- Section II, Q5. Discuss Feminist Theory on Gender Issues.
- Section II, Q6. Examine the relationship between State and Civil Society.
- Section II, Q7. Describe J. S. Mill’s views on Liberty.
- Section II, Q8. Explain Liberal and Marxist views on ‘Family and State’ relationship.
Two of these are classic long answers. Rawls needs the original position and both principles of justice set out in the right order, and Q8 asks you to compare two traditions in one answer, which is where most students lose marks.
BPSC 131 Introduction to Political Theory block and unit wise syllabus
BPSC 131 has 4 blocks and 14 units on eGyanKosh: Introducing Political Theory, two blocks of Concepts, and Debates in Political Theory. The table lists every unit with the topics IGNOU has actually examined from it and the June 2026 questions it feeds.
Block 4 is the one students skip most, yet each of its four debates has been set in past papers. Read this table alongside your BPSC 131 Study Material so you know which unit every answer draws on.
| Block | Unit | Topics IGNOU has examined | June 2026 question |
|---|---|---|---|
| Block 1: Introducing Political Theory | Unit 1 What is Politics? | Politics as a vocation; politics as a practical activity; legitimate use of power and Weber | Q1 |
| Block 1: Introducing Political Theory | Unit 2 What is Political Theory? | The claim that political theory is dead; empirical approach; contemporary approaches | None set |
| Block 2: Concepts | Unit 3 Liberty | Berlin's two concepts of liberty; Mill's notion of liberty; Marxist critique of freedom | Q2 and Q7 |
| Block 2: Concepts | Unit 4 Equality | Inter-relationship of equality and liberty; liberal justification of inequality | None set |
| Block 2: Concepts | Unit 5 Justice | Rawls' theory of justice; distributive and economic justice; justice as a term of synthesis | Q3 |
| Block 2: Concepts | Unit 6 Rights | Natural and legal rights theories; how rights differ from claims; nature of rights | None set |
| Block 3: Concepts | Unit 7 Democracy | Procedural and substantive democracy; pluralist democracy; features of democracy in India | Q4 |
| Block 3: Concepts | Unit 8 Gender | Meaning of gender; radical and socialist feminist views of patriarchy; gender mainstreaming | Q5 |
| Block 3: Concepts | Unit 9 Citizenship | Liberal and communitarian theories; global citizenship; factors deciding entitlement | None set |
| Block 3: Concepts | Unit 10 Civil Society and State | Inter-relationship of state and civil society; liberal-individualist understanding of state | Q6 |
| Block 4: Debates in Political Theory | Unit 11 Democracy vs. Economic Growth | Whether democracy and growth are compatible; economic growth versus development | None set |
| Block 4: Debates in Political Theory | Unit 12 Liberty vs. Censorship | Relationship between liberty and censorship; the concept of censorship | None set |
| Block 4: Debates in Political Theory | Unit 13 Protective Discrimination vs. Principle of Fairness | Protective discrimination for underprivileged sections; the principle of fairness | None set |
| Block 4: Debates in Political Theory | Unit 14 Family, Law and State | Marxist and feminist views of family and state; family as an agent of socialisation | Q8 |
How the June 2026 BPSC 131 paper is set: sections, choice and marks
The BPSC 131 Question Paper for June 2026 prints 8 essay questions in two sections, and you answer five in three hours for 100 marks. At least two answers must come from each section.
The format has stayed steady, but two details have shifted over recent sessions, as the table shows. You can compare the wording yourself in any IGNOU Previous Year Question Paper for this course.
| Element | June 2026 paper | Earlier BPSC 131 papers |
|---|---|---|
| Time and maximum marks | 3 hours, 100 marks | Same in every session from December 2021 to December 2025 |
| Questions printed | 8: Q1 to Q4 in Section I, Q5 to Q8 in Section II | 8 in every session |
| Choice rule | Answer 5, at least 2 from each section | Same rule throughout |
| Marks per question | Equal marks, so 20 each | Stated as 20 marks per question |
| Word guidance | About 400 words per answer | 500 words in December 2021, June 2024 and December 2024 |
| Short-note splits | None; all 8 are single long answers | Two 200-word notes appeared in December 2022, June 2023, December 2023 and December 2025 |
| Language | Printed in English and Hindi | Bilingual in every session |
Because June 2026 has no short notes, every attempted question needs a full essay. Plan roughly 35 minutes per answer and keep the last few minutes to check that each one ends with a clear conclusion.
Repeat topics across eight BPSC 131 papers
Gender and citizenship are the most repeated BPSC 131 themes, each set in 7 of the last 8 official papers we checked. Justice follows with 6 and rights with 5.
We counted each topic once per session across eight official papers: December 2021, December 2022, June 2023, December 2023, June 2024, December 2024, June 2025 and December 2025. The June 2022 paper could not be located on IGNOU’s sites, so it is not included. The last column shows whether the topic returned in June 2026.
| Topic | Sessions where asked | Count (of 8) | In June 2026? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gender, feminism and patriarchy | December 2022; June 2023; December 2023; June 2024; December 2024; June 2025; December 2025 | 7 | Yes, Q5 |
| Theories of citizenship (liberal, communitarian, global) | December 2021; December 2022; June 2023; December 2023; June 2024; December 2024; December 2025 | 7 | Skipped |
| Justice (fairness, distributive and social justice) | December 2021; December 2022; June 2023; December 2023; December 2024; December 2025 | 6 | Yes, Q3 (Rawls) |
| Rights (natural, legal, rights versus claims) | December 2022; December 2023; June 2024; December 2024; June 2025 | 5 | Skipped |
| Family and state relationship | December 2021; June 2023; December 2024; June 2025 | 4 | Yes, Q8 |
| State and civil society | December 2021; December 2022; June 2023; December 2025 | 4 | Yes, Q6 |
| Liberty: Mill, Berlin and censorship | December 2021; June 2023; December 2023; June 2025 | 4 | Yes, Q7 (Mill) |
| Democracy and economic growth | December 2021; June 2023; December 2024; June 2025 | 4 | Skipped |
| Approaches to political theory | December 2021; December 2023; December 2024; December 2025 | 4 | Skipped |
| Equality and the liberal case for inequality | December 2022; June 2023; June 2025 | 3 | Skipped |
| Legitimate power and Weber | December 2022; June 2025 | 2 | Yes, Q1 |
| Marxist idea or critique of freedom | December 2022; June 2024 | 2 | Yes, Q2 |
| Features of democracy in India | December 2024; December 2025 | 2 | Yes, Q4 |
Citizenship and rights, two of the four most repeated themes, were both skipped in June 2026. Students preparing for December 2026 should treat them as high priority, along with our wider list of IGNOU Important Questions for BAG courses.
Looking up the IGNOU BPSC 131 Question Paper for any one session gives you a single snapshot. Read together, the papers show that IGNOU rewords the same ideas, so a strong answer on Weber or Mill can be reused with small changes.
How our BPSC 131 political theory answers are written and checked
Every BPSC 131 answer is written by our political science team, then checked for accuracy and length before it goes into the file. The process is the same for all 8 questions.
- The question wording is broken into its parts. Q4, for example, asks both why parliamentary democracy was chosen and what its features are, so the answer covers both.
- Each thinker is tied to a named work and year, such as Weber’s 1919 lecture Politics as a Vocation or Mill’s On Liberty of 1859.
- Every answer includes an evaluation, because IGNOU questions that say discuss, examine or describe expect critical comment as well as explanation.
- Indian examples are added where they fit, such as the Constitution as a source of legal-rational authority.
Course and programme details on this page were checked against the official BPSC-131 course page on eGyanKosh, IGNOU’s self-learning material repository, which sets out the four blocks. Answers are written by Prateek Talwar’s team and reviewed by Sheetal Kirola.
BPSC 131 solved file index for June 2026
The full BPSC 131 file answers all 8 questions; 2 are readable on this page and 6 are in the full file only. BPSC 131 is a theory course with no practical or record work, so this index maps each question to its eGyanKosh block and unit instead.
| Q | Section | Topic | Block and unit | Where to read it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | I | Weber and legitimate power | Block 1, Unit 1 | On this page |
| 2 | I | Marxist freedom | Block 2, Unit 3 | On this page |
| 3 | I | Rawls on justice | Block 2, Unit 5 | Full file only |
| 4 | I | Parliamentary democracy in India | Block 3, Unit 7 | Full file only |
| 5 | II | Feminist theory on gender | Block 3, Unit 8 | Full file only |
| 6 | II | State and civil society | Block 3, Unit 10 | Full file only |
| 7 | II | Mill on liberty | Block 2, Unit 3 | Full file only |
| 8 | II | Family and state: liberal and Marxist | Block 4, Unit 14 | Full file only |
The preview pages below come from the IGNOU BPSC 131 Solved Question Paper PDF itself: the cover, the index and the two sample answers. Pages for the other questions are blurred.
Programmes that study BPSC 131 Introduction to Political Theory
BPSC 131 belongs to the political science stream of the IGNOU Bachelor of Arts (General) programme, and the printed paper carries the BAG code. IGNOU’s BAG course list includes BPSC-131 alongside BPSC-132 and BPSC-133.
Students of other schemes study political theory under different codes. BA Honours Political Science learners take BPSC 101 Understanding Political Theory, and BPSM 161 also carries the title Introduction to Political Theory. Each has its own term-end paper, so match the code on your hall ticket before you buy any solved paper.
Get the full BPSC 131 Solved Question Paper on WhatsApp
Send BPSC 131 June 2026 to WhatsApp 9899436384 and we share the complete PDF with all 8 solved answers. That means the 6 answers you cannot see here plus the 2 samples above.
Our team replies with the price and payment details. Once payment is confirmed, the PDF is sent in the same chat, usually within working hours, and you can ask a question about any answer in that chat.
If you are writing more than one paper this term, ask for the matching BAG Question Paper files in the same conversation so all your courses are covered together.
BPSC 131 FAQs: political theory paper questions answered
These answers cover the BPSC 131 questions students ask us most often about the June 2026 paper.
What does the BPSC 131 Solved Question Paper June 2026 contain?
It contains complete answers to all 8 questions of the IGNOU BPSC 131 June 2026 term-end paper, written to the 400-word length the paper asks for. Each answer has an introduction, headed body points, named thinkers such as Weber, Marx, Rawls and Mill, an evaluation and a conclusion. Two of these answers are shown on this page so you can judge the quality first.
How many questions are in the BPSC 131 June 2026 paper and how many must I attempt?
The BPSC 131 June 2026 paper prints 8 questions, four in Section I and four in Section II. You must attempt five in all, choosing at least two from each section. The paper says all questions carry equal marks, which works out to 20 marks each out of 100, and asks for about 400 words per answer within three hours.
How do I get the full BPSC 131 solved file on WhatsApp?
Send a message to WhatsApp 9899436384 with the words BPSC 131 June 2026. Our team replies with the price and payment details, then shares the complete PDF with solved answers to all 8 questions. That includes the 6 answers not shown on this page and the 2 sample answers you can already read here, so you get the whole paper in one file.
Which BPSC 131 Introduction to Political Theory topics repeat most often?
Across eight official IGNOU papers from December 2021 to December 2025, gender and feminism appeared in seven sessions and citizenship theories also in seven. Justice came up in six sessions and rights in five. Family and state, state and civil society, liberty and democracy with economic growth each appeared in four. Citizenship and rights were both skipped in June 2026.
Should BPSC 131 answers be 400 or 500 words long?
Follow the word guidance printed on your own paper. The June 2026 BPSC 131 paper asks for about 400 words per answer, as did June 2025 and December 2025. The December 2021, June 2024 and December 2024 papers asked for 500 words. Our solved answers follow the 400-word guidance of the June 2026 paper, with clear headings so you can expand them when needed.
Is BPSC 131 the same course as BPSM 161 or BPSC 101?
No. BPSC 131 Introduction to Political Theory is the BAG course with its own term-end paper. BPSM 161 also carries the title Introduction to Political Theory but sits in a different scheme, and BPSC 101 Understanding Political Theory belongs to BA Honours Political Science. Their papers are set separately, so always check the course code printed on your hall ticket.
Will the BPSC 131 June 2026 solved paper help for the December 2026 exam?
Yes, because BPSC 131 repeats its core themes closely. The June 2026 question on Weber and legitimation nearly repeats June 2025, and the state and civil society question repeats December 2025. Studying these eight solved answers covers liberty, justice, democracy, state, gender and family, which together account for most questions IGNOU has set in recent sessions.
Who writes and checks the BPSC 131 answers?
The BPSC 131 answers are written by our political science subject team led by Prateek Talwar and reviewed by Sheetal Kirola before release. Each answer is checked against the IGNOU course material for the thinker, the work and the year cited, and against the question wording, so that the answer addresses exactly what the examiner asked rather than a related topic.