Question

Read the following passage and answer the question below.

The greens' success has clear policy implications, especially on issues of nuclear power, ecological tax reform, and citizenship rights. But success also has implications for parties themselves. Greens have always faced a unique 'strategic conundrum' arising from their unique beliefs and movement roots. Put simply, how can they reconcile their radical alternative politics with participation in mainstream or 'grey' parliamentary and government structures? Throughout the 1990s most parties shed their radical cloth in an attempt to capture votes, even at the expense of party unity and purity. Most were rewarded with electoral success well beyond what had been imaginable in the 1980s. The price to pay has been tortured internal debates about strategy, and new questions about green party identity and purpose. Today the key questions facing green parties revolve around not whether to embrace power, but what to do with it. More specifically, green parties face three new challenges in the new millennium: first, how to carve out a policy niche as established parties and governments become wiser to green demands, and as green concerns themselves appear more mainstream. Second, how to make green ideas spread beyond the confines of rich industrialised states into Eastern Europe and the developing world, where green parties remain marginal and environmental problems acute. Third, how to ensure that the broader role of green parties, as consciousness raisers, agitators, conscience of parliament and politics, is not sacrificed on the altar of electoral success. Green parties have come a long way since their emergence and development in the 1970s and 1980s. They have become established players able to shape party competition, government formation, and government policy. But this very 'establishment' carries risk for a party whose core values and identities depend mightily on their ability to challenge the conventional order, to agitate and to annoy. For most green parties, the greatest fear is not electoral decline so much as the prospect of becoming a party with parliamentary platform, ministerial voice, but nothing to say.

Question: How best can mainstream political parties, in India, keep green parties at bay?

• A. By imposing a green tax.
• B. By allowing carbon trading.
• C. By including green agenda in their governance.
• D. By hiring Al Gore, the Nobel prize winner, as an ambassador.

Hint:

Think about what removes the reason for a separate green party to exist, rather than what merely competes with it on one issue.

Answer 1

The Correct Option is C

The question asks for an application of the passage's logic to Indian politics: what would most directly take away a green party's reason to exist as a separate force? The passage's first challenge already answers this in general terms, green parties struggle to keep their niche once established parties and governments become wiser to green demands. If a mainstream party governs on green issues itself, voters no longer need a separate green party to represent those concerns.

1. By imposing a green tax: a single tax measure is only one policy tool. It does not cover the full range of green concerns a party represents, so it would not by itself sideline the green party.
2. By allowing carbon trading: like a green tax, this is one narrow market mechanism, not a broad governance shift, so green parties would still have plenty of ground left to campaign on.
3. By including green agenda in their governance: this matches the passage's own diagnosis directly. Once mainstream parties absorb green demands into how they actually govern, the green party's unique appeal fades, exactly the niche-erosion problem the passage describes.
4. By hiring Al Gore, the Nobel prize winner, as an ambassador: a celebrity endorsement is a branding move, not a governance change, and does nothing to address the underlying green agenda.

Absorbing the green agenda into actual governance is the one option broad enough to erode the green party's separate appeal, matching the passage's own account of the pressure mainstream parties put on green parties.