Directions: Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow by choosing the correct/most appropriate options:

Our social contract _______ built on an edifice that grants pre-eminence to individual choice. The Constitution’s Preamble recognizes this when it places an onus on the state to secure to all citizens, among other things, liberty, equality, and fraternity. The last of those values is fortified by a further commitment. The state, the Preamble says, will guarantee “fraternity assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the Nation”.

The chief architect of the Constitution, B.R. Ambedkar, saw the standards contained in these words as forming a triumvirate of values. Liberty, equality, and fraternity, he said, were principles of life, “a union of trinity”. Divorce one from the other and the very purpose of democracy will be defeated. The Constituent Assembly believed that it was only a deep commitment to these principles that can help usher in a social revolution in the country. The structures of India’s democracy — the various minutiae of administration that the Constitution spells out — were each built on the idea that securing individual happiness required the state to foreground these standards.

In that picture, independent courts, the framers thought, would stand as a guardrail against any effort to undermine social democracy. But far from acting as “sentinels on the qui vive” — as a former Chief Justice of India once described the Supreme Court of India’s role — the judiciary has time and again enforced the popular morality of the day, treating values of individual freedom as dispensable trifles. Tuesday’s judgment by the Karnataka High Court, in Resham vs the State of Karnataka, is the newest addition to this litany. It upholds a ban imposed on the use of hijabs by students in classrooms across the State (Karnataka), and, in doing so, strikes a blow against each of the principles contained in B.R. Ambedkar’s union of trinity.