UPSC Prelims 2024— Question 26

The correct answer is option (D). The Supreme Court's landmark privacy judgment in K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India recognised privacy as a fundamental right primarily protected under Article 21, read with the freedoms and guarantees of Part III. Articles 15, 16 and 19 protect other specific rights but are not the constitutional article asked for here. The key to this question is to distinguish the exact constitutional provision, factual association, scientific principle, or current-affairs detail being tested from statements that are partly true but incomplete or incorrectly framed. UPSC often makes the distractors plausible by changing one institutional role, date, classification, geographic association, or causal relationship. Option A — “Article 15” is incorrect. It does not match the established fact or contains the incorrect combination, institution, relationship, classification, or proposition identified in the explanation above. Choosing it would therefore introduce a factual error or omit a necessary element. Option B — “Article 16” is incorrect. It does not match the established fact or contains the incorrect combination, institution, relationship, classification, or proposition identified in the explanation above. Choosing it would therefore introduce a factual error or omit a necessary element. Option C — “Article 19” is incorrect. It does not match the established fact or contains the incorrect combination, institution, relationship, classification, or proposition identified in the explanation above. Choosing it would therefore introduce a factual error or omit a necessary element. Option D — “Article 21” is correct. It matches the established fact described above and gives the complete combination or identification required by the question. For examination purposes, the safest approach is to verify each statement independently before looking at the answer-code combination. This is particularly important in statement-based questions, because one false clause makes an entire combination wrong. In factual questions, compare the defining characteristic asked in the stem with each alternative rather than relying on superficial familiarity. The answer recorded here follows the verified Set C key used for this database.