Revolutionary, Peasant and Political Currents

The Tebhaga movement of 1946 to 1947 was led by the Bengal Provincial Kisan Sabha, the peasant front of the Communist Party of India, and was fought by bargadars or sharecroppers, not by owner cultivators. The name states the demand: tebhaga means three shares, and the claim was that the crop be divided so that the cultivator kept two thirds instead of the customary half, which is the same thing as reducing the landlord's share from one half to one third. The demand had already been recommended by the Floud Commission, the Land Revenue Commission of 1940, which gave the agitation its legitimacy.

• Option (a) states this and is correct.
• Option (b) is incorrect, and is the most attractive distractor, because the claim of land to the tiller belongs to a different and later register of peasant politics, notably the Telangana struggle and the post independence land reform debate; Tebhaga was a struggle over the crop share, not over title.
• Option (c) is incorrect: the abolition of zamindari was a demand of the Kisan Sabha movement generally and was accomplished by legislation after independence, but it was not the demand that defined Tebhaga.
• Option (d) is incorrect; debt relief was the animating demand of movements such as the Deccan Riots of 1875 and figures in the Punjab and Kisan Sabha agitations, but not here. The elimination route is the name of the movement itself, which encodes the answer.

• Statement 1 is correct. Annie Besant launched her Home Rule League in September 1916 at Madras, working alongside and in loose coordination with Tilak's Indian Home Rule League founded at Poona in April of that year, and her League operated across the rest of India through a network of branches. Her internment in June 1917, with Wadia and Arundale, produced the agitation that forced her release and made her the movement's most visible figure.
• Statement 2 is incorrect and is the item the question is testing. The Theosophical Society was founded in New York in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky and Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, with the headquarters moved to Adyar in Madras in 1882. Annie Besant joined the Society only in 1889, after reviewing Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine, and became its international President in 1907, so she led it but did not found it, and she was fourteen years old when it was founded.
• Statement 3 is correct. She was elected President of the Indian National Congress at the Calcutta session of 1917, immediately after her release from internment, becoming the first woman to hold the office. The official answer (c) follows. The elimination route is the founding of the Theosophical Society, which appears in options (b) and (d), so a candidate who knows the Blavatsky and Olcott attribution disposes of half the option set at once and is left deciding between (a) and (c) on the Congress presidency.

• Option (b) is correct. The partition took effect on 16 October 1905 and was annulled by royal proclamation at the Delhi Durbar of December 1911, the announcement being made by King George V in person. The annulment was accompanied by two further changes: Bengal was reorganised on linguistic lines with Bihar and Orissa separated into a new province, and the capital was transferred from Calcutta to Delhi, a move calculated both to remove the government from the centre of nationalist agitation and to associate British rule with the imperial traditions of Delhi.
• Option (a) is incorrect: the First World War began in 1914, after the annulment.
• Option (c) is incorrect: the Civil Disobedience Movement began in 1930, nearly two decades later.
• Option (d) is incorrect and is the strongest distractor, since Bengal was in fact partitioned again in 1947 and East Bengal did become East Pakistan; the trap is to conflate the two partitions, which were separate events with different causes twenty-six years apart. The chronological anchor to hold is that the Delhi Durbar of 1911 carries three facts at once, the annulment, the reorganisation and the transfer of the capital.

• Option (a) is correct. The Ghadar Party was founded in 1913 among Punjabi emigrants on the Pacific coast of North America, with Sohan Singh Bhakna as president and Lala Har Dayal as secretary, and its headquarters was the Yugantar Ashram in San Francisco, from which it published the paper Ghadar in Urdu, Punjabi and other languages. The word means revolt or mutiny, chosen in conscious reference to 1857. On the outbreak of the First World War the party called on Indians abroad to return and raise an armed rising, which was planned for February 1915 and betrayed, leading to the Lahore Conspiracy Case.
• Option (c) is incorrect but names a real body: the Berlin Committee, later the Indian Independence Committee, was formed in 1915 by Virendranath Chattopadhyaya and others under German patronage, and worked with the Ghadar movement without being it.
• Option (d) is incorrect and likewise names something real: the émigré Communist Party of India was formed at Tashkent in 1920 by M. N. Roy and others.
• Option (b) is incorrect: Singapore is associated with the 1915 mutiny of the 5th Light Infantry and later with the Indian National Army, not with the Ghadar. The item rewards a candidate who keeps the several overseas revolutionary centres distinct.

The official answer is (d), none of the three. The Congress Socialist Party was founded at Patna in 1934 by Jayaprakash Narayan, Acharya Narendra Deva, Minoo Masani, Achyut Patwardhan and others as a socialist bloc within the Congress.

• Statement 1 is incorrect: boycott of foreign goods and refusal to pay taxes were the instruments of the Gandhian mass movements and of the Swadeshi programme before them, not of the Congress Socialist Party, whose programme was the transfer of power to the producing masses, nationalisation of key industries, abolition of landlordism without compensation, and the organisation of workers and peasants.
• Statement 2 is incorrect and is the sharpest of the three: the Congress Socialists were democratic socialists who explicitly rejected the dictatorship of the proletariat, and that rejection was the principal line of division between them and the Communist Party of India, with which they had an uneasy relationship through the 1930s.
• Statement 3 is incorrect: the party opposed separate electorates and communal representation altogether, holding that class organisation across religious lines was the answer to communalism.
• Options (a), (b) and (c) each require at least one statement to be true. There is no elimination route, and an all correct or none option set of this kind is unusually punishing, since a candidate must be confident about all three propositions before marking None.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. The first woman President of the Indian National Congress was Annie Besant, who presided at the Calcutta session of 1917 at the height of the Home Rule agitation. Sarojini Naidu, who presided at Kanpur in 1925, was the first Indian woman to hold the office, and the omission of the word Indian is exactly what makes the statement false.
• Statement 2 is correct: Badruddin Tyabji, a Bombay barrister and later a judge of the Bombay High Court, presided over the third session at Madras in 1887, two years after the founding, and used the office to urge Muslim participation against Sayyid Ahmad Khan's advice to stay away. The official answer (b) follows. The governing principle is that a statement of a first is falsified by a single earlier instance, and candidates should hold the parallel pairs together: W. C. Bonnerjee first President, Badruddin Tyabji first Muslim President, Annie Besant first woman President, Sarojini Naidu first Indian woman President, George Yule first British President.

• Option (a) is correct. The Swadeshi and Boycott movement launched against the partition of Bengal in 1905 forced open a division that had been latent since the 1890s: the extremists, led by Tilak, Lajpat Rai and Bipin Chandra Pal, wanted the boycott extended beyond Bengal and beyond foreign goods to a full programme of passive resistance and the declaration of swaraj as the goal, while the moderates under Gokhale and Pherozeshah Mehta wished to confine it to Bengal and to goods. The disagreement broke the Congress at the Surat session of December 1907, and the two wings reunited only at Lucknow in 1916.
• Options (b), (c) and (d) are all chronologically impossible as causes of this split, the Non-Cooperation Movement dating from 1920, Civil Disobedience from 1930 and Quit India from 1942, all after the reunion. The elimination route is therefore purely chronological, which makes this an item that rewards a secure timeline more than any detailed knowledge of the dispute.

Swadeshi and boycott were adopted as formal methods of struggle during the anti-partition agitation in Bengal that followed Curzon's announcement of 1905, the boycott resolution being passed at the Calcutta Town Hall meeting of 7 August 1905 and the movement running to 1908. The two were complements: boycott of British goods created the demand that swadeshi enterprise was to meet, and the campaign extended beyond goods to schools, courts and titles. Hence (a).

• Option (b) is wrong on chronology, the Home Rule Leagues dating from 1916.
• Option (c) is wrong for the same reason and is the strongest distractor, since non-cooperation from 1920 used boycott on a far larger scale; the question asks for the first adoption, not the fullest use, and this is the discriminator on which the item turns.
• Option (d) is wrong: the Simon Commission of 1927-28 was met with boycott of the Commission itself, which is a later and different application. A candidate need only order the four events chronologically, since the earliest of them is the answer to any question phrased as a first adoption.

The split at Surat in December 1907 arose from the accumulated divergence between the moderates and the extremists over method. The extremists, led by Tilak, Lajpat Rai and Bipin Chandra Pal, had concluded that constitutional agitation, petition and prayer would extract nothing from the British, and pressed for the extension of swadeshi, boycott and national education from Bengal to the whole country; the moderates wished to confine the programme to Bengal and to keep faith with negotiation, encouraged by the prospect of the reforms that became the Morley-Minto scheme. The immediate flashpoints were the presidency and the disputed resolutions, but the underlying cause is the extremists' loss of confidence in the moderate method, giving (b).

• Option (a) is wrong on both attribution and effect: communal representation came through the Morley-Minto reforms of 1909, after the split, and did not cause it.
• Option (c) is wrong: the Muslim League was founded in 1906 and is unconnected with an internal Congress division.
• Option (d) inverts the facts of the presidency dispute, which concerned Rash Behari Ghosh and Lala Lajpat Rai rather than Aurobindo Ghosh. Chronology alone disposes of options (a) and (c).

• Option (d) is correct. The Trade Disputes Act, 1929 established machinery for the settlement of industrial disputes through Courts of Inquiry and Conciliation Boards, and it prohibited strikes in public utility services unless a month's notice had been given, while also outlawing strikes having any object other than the furtherance of a trade dispute, which was aimed squarely at sympathetic and political strikes. A system of tribunals coupled with restrictions on the right to strike is therefore an accurate description.
• Option (a) describes workers' participation in management, which belongs to the post independence period and entered the Constitution only through Article 43A in 1976; it has nothing to do with 1929.
• Option (b) is wrong because the Act conferred powers on the colonial State and its adjudicatory machinery, not arbitrary powers on private management.
• Option (c) is wrong because the machinery created was Indian, consisting of locally constituted inquiry and conciliation bodies, not the British Court. Context worth carrying: the Act was passed in the same year as the Meerut Conspiracy Case and alongside the Public Safety Bill, in a deliberate legislative effort to contain the growing communist influence in the trade union movement, and it was one of the measures against which the Legislative Assembly bomb protest of April 1929 was directed.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. The Factories Act, 1881 was the first Indian factory legislation and dealt with the employment of children, prohibiting work by children under seven, limiting children between seven and twelve to nine hours a day, providing for rest intervals and holidays, and requiring the fencing of dangerous machinery. It said nothing about wages and nothing about trade unions. The right to combine was not addressed until the Trade Unions Act, 1926, forty five years later, and wage regulation waited until the Payment of Wages Act, 1936 and the Minimum Wages Act, 1948.
• Statement 2 is correct. Narayan Meghaji Lokhande, a Jyotiba Phule associate from the Satyashodhak movement, organised the Bombay mill hands, founded the Bombay Millhands Association in 1884, which is generally treated as the first Indian labour organisation, convened the workers' meeting that petitioned the Factory Commission, and secured the weekly Sunday holiday for mill workers in 1890. He is properly described as a pioneer of the labour movement in British India. Only statement 2 survives, giving (b). Elimination route: early colonial factory legislation was uniformly protective and paternalist in scope, addressing hours, child labour and safety, and never conceded collective rights, so statement 1 can be rejected on the character of the legislation without recalling the 1881 Act's clauses.

• Pair 1 is correctly matched. Radhakanta Deb, the conservative Calcutta notable who had led the opposition to the abolition of sati, became the first President of the British Indian Association on its formation in 1851 by the merger of the Landholders' Society with the Bengal British India Society, with Debendranath Tagore as Secretary.
• Pair 2 is incorrectly matched and is the eliminating pair. Gazulu Lakshminarasu Chetty founded the Madras Native Association in 1852 and the newspaper Crescent, and was the leading Madras public figure of the mid century. The Madras Mahajana Sabha is a later and different body, founded in 1884 by M. Viraraghavachariar, P. Anandacharlu and G. Subramania Iyer, and belongs to the immediate pre Congress generation rather than to the 1850s. The two are separated by more than thirty years and by an entire change in the character of Indian political association.
• Pair 3 is correctly matched. Surendranath Banerjee, with Anandamohan Bose, founded the Indian Association in 1876, which agitated on the civil service age limit and the Ilbert Bill and convened the Indian National Conference of 1883 and 1885. Rejecting pair 2 eliminates (c) and (d), and pair 1 then decides between (a) and (b). Governing principle: the pre Congress associations fall into two waves, the landholder bodies of the 1850s and the middle class bodies of the 1870s and 1880s, and most errors in this family come from crossing the two waves.

• Option (c) is correct. Lala Lajpat Rai wrote biographical works on Mazzini, Garibaldi, Shivaji and Shri Krishna, was deported to Mandalay in 1907, spent the years from 1914 to 1920 abroad, chiefly in the United States, where he founded the Indian Home Rule League of America and the journal Young India, and was elected to the Central Legislative Assembly in 1926. Every clause of the stem therefore fits him.
• Option (a) fails on the American residence and on the Assembly: Aurobindo Ghosh withdrew to Pondicherry in 1910 and never sat in a legislature.
• Option (b) fails because Bipin Chandra Pal's foreign sojourn was in England, not America, and he is not associated with this set of biographies.
• Option (d) fails because Motilal Nehru, though certainly a member of the Central Legislative Assembly and its Opposition leader, was a constitutional lawyer and Swarajist and wrote no such biographies. Elimination route: the American residence is the sharpest discriminator, since it removes Aurobindo and Pal in one stroke, and the choice of European nationalist subjects, Mazzini and Garibaldi, points to the Extremist rather than the Liberal constitutionalist tradition, which removes Motilal Nehru.

Hence (c).

• Statement 1 is correct. After the Santhal hool of 1855 to 1856 led by Sidhu and Kanhu Murmu was suppressed, the colonial government carved out a separate administrative unit, the Santhal Parganas, from parts of Bhagalpur and Birbhum, and placed it under a non regulation regime in which the ordinary laws and the ordinary civil courts of Bengal did not apply and a Deputy Commissioner exercised combined executive and judicial authority.
• Statement 2 is correct. Restrictions on the alienation of Santhal land to outsiders were imposed as part of the same settlement and were consolidated later in the Santhal Parganas Tenancy Act, so that transfer of land by a Santhal to a non Santhal was barred. Both statements being correct, the answer is (c). The governing logic is worth teaching because it repeats across colonial tribal policy. The revolt was driven by dispossession at the hands of the dikus, the moneylenders, traders and revenue farmers who had acquired Santhal land through debt, so the administrative response addressed the cause in two ways: territorial insulation through a separately administered tract, and legal insulation through a bar on land transfer. The same pattern appears in the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act of 1908 after Birsa Munda's ulgulan and in the scheduled and excluded areas of the Government of India Act, 1935, which are the ancestors of the Fifth and Sixth Schedules.

Hence (c).

• Option (d) is correct. The Hind Mazdoor Sabha was founded at Howrah in December 1948 by socialists who had left the Congress, together with elements of the Indian Federation of Labour, and Ashok Mehta, T. S. Ramanujam and G. G. Mehta are named as its founders. Its formation completes the fragmentation of the Indian trade union movement along party lines in the years around independence: the All India Trade Union Congress of 1920 came under Communist control, the Indian National Trade Union Congress was founded in 1947 as the Congress affiliate, the Hind Mazdoor Sabha in 1948 as the Socialist body, and the United Trades Union Congress followed in 1949.
• Option (a) is wrong because Krishna Pillai, Namboodiripad and K. C. George were founders of the Communist movement in Kerala and are associated with the formation of the Communist Party unit there, not with a socialist trade union centre.
• Option (b) is a deliberately implausible grouping, since Jayaprakash Narayan, Deen Dayal Upadhyay and M. N. Roy belonged to three mutually opposed political traditions, socialist, Hindu nationalist and radical humanist after Roy's break with communism, and would not have founded a single organisation together; Jayaprakash Narayan's presence is the bait.
• Option (c) is wrong and is chronologically incoherent, Veeresalingam Pantulu having died in 1919, three decades before the event. Elimination route: the internal inconsistency of options (b) and (c) can be seen without knowing anything about the Hind Mazdoor Sabha, and option (a) can be rejected on the Communist identity of its three names, which leaves (d). Hence (d). Rated Difficult because the correct option contains no famous name and can only be reached by discrediting the other three.

• Option (a) is correct. The All India Home Rule League, founded by Annie Besant in 1916 alongside Tilak's Indian Home Rule League, came under Gandhi's presidency in April 1920, and at his instance its name was changed to Swarajya Sabha and its constitution altered to adopt the attainment of swaraj by all legitimate and peaceful means as its object. The change marks the absorption of the Home Rule agitation into the Gandhian movement, and it caused a substantial section of the older membership, including Besant herself, to withdraw, since they read the new object as a departure from the constitutional demand for self government within the Empire. The League was wound up soon afterwards as Non Cooperation took its place.
• Option (b) is wrong: the Hindu Mahasabha was founded in 1915 and reorganised in the 1920s under Malaviya and later Savarkar, and it never bore this name.
• Option (c) is wrong: the South Indian Liberal Federation, founded in 1916, was the non Brahmin party of the Madras Presidency, popularly the Justice Party after its newspaper, and it later became the Dravidar Kazhagam under Periyar rather than a Swarajya Sabha.
• Option (d) is wrong: the Servants of India Society, founded by Gokhale in 1905 to train national missionaries for constitutional and social work, continued under that name after his death. Chronological anchor: 1920 is the year Gandhi assumed the leadership of the national movement, so an organisational change in that year renaming a body around swaraj points to the vehicle he took over.

Hence (a).

• Statement 1 is correct. The Swadeshi Movement launched after the partition of Bengal in 1905 gave a direct impetus to indigenous enterprise and craft, producing swadeshi textile mills, soap and match factories, tanneries, handloom weaving revival, the Bengal Chemical and Pharmaceutical Works of P. C. Ray and a range of small artisan enterprises. Whatever its commercial limitations, revival of indigenous crafts and industries is precisely what the boycott half of the boycott and swadeshi programme was intended to achieve.
• Statement 2 is correct. The National Council of Education was founded in August 1906 as part of the movement's programme of national education, and the Bengal National College under Aurobindo Ghosh was its most prominent institution. Since both statements hold, the official answer (c) follows. The governing frame is that the Swadeshi Movement operated on four planks, namely boycott, swadeshi enterprise, national education and samitis, and both statements test one plank each.

• Pair 1 is correct. The All India Anti-Untouchability League was founded in 1932 in the aftermath of the Poona Pact, with Gandhi as its moving force and Ghanshyam Das Birla as president and Amritlal Thakkar as secretary; it was renamed the Harijan Sevak Sangh the following year.
• Pair 2 is correct. The All India Kisan Sabha was founded at Lucknow in 1936 and Swami Sahajanand Saraswati, the Bihar peasant leader, was its first president.
• Pair 3 is correct. The Self-Respect Movement was launched in 1925 in the Madras Presidency by E. V. Ramaswami Naicker, Periyar, as a rationalist and anti-Brahminical movement. Since all three pairs hold, the official answer (d) follows. There is no elimination route here, which is what keeps a very familiar set of associations from being trivial, but each pairing is standard textbook content and a candidate confident of any two can infer the third from the option structure, since no option offers exactly two of these three in the combination that would arise from doubting pair 1.

• Pair 1 is correct. Tej Bahadur Sapru, the constitutional lawyer who left the Congress after the Nagpur session and became the leading Moderate voice at the Round Table Conferences and the author of the Sapru Committee report of 1945, presided over the All India Liberal Federation, the body formed by the Moderates in 1918 after the split with the Congress.
• Pair 2 is correct. Kshitish Chandra Neogy was a member of the Constituent Assembly, served in the interim and first union cabinets, and was subsequently appointed chairman of the First Finance Commission in 1951, which is the association through which he is most often encountered.
• Pair 3 is correct. Puran Chand Joshi was General Secretary of the Communist Party of India from 1935 to 1947 and was the party's dominant figure through the People's War line and the wartime years. Since all three pairs hold, the official answer (d) follows. There is no elimination route, and pair 2 in particular sits outside standard textbook coverage unless a candidate carries the First Finance Commission chairmanship, which is why this is a difficult item despite its familiar format.

Ulgulan, meaning the great tumult, is the Mundari name for the movement led by Birsa Munda in the Chhotanagpur region between 1899 and 1900, directed against dikus, moneylenders and missionaries and against the erosion of the khuntkatti communal tenure. Hence (d).

• Option (a) is wrong because the Revolt of 1857 is described in the sources as the sepoy mutiny, the first war of independence or simply the great rebellion, never as ulgulan.
• Option (b) is wrong because the Mappila rising in Malabar was an agrarian and communal tenant revolt in the Ernad and Valluvanad taluks.
• Option (c) is wrong because the Indigo revolt is known as the Nil Bidroha or Blue Rebellion. The outcome of the ulgulan was the Chhotanagpur Tenancy Act of 1908, which recognised khuntkatti rights.

Songs from Prison was published in 1934 and comprises devotional lyrics that Gandhi translated from Sanskrit and Gujarati during his imprisonment at Yeravda, adapted into English with an introduction by John Sargent Hoyland, so option (c) is correct.

• Option (a) fails because Tilak's prison writing is the Gita Rahasya, composed at Mandalay, a philosophical commentary rather than a translation of lyrics.
• Option (b) fails because Nehru's prison works are Glimpses of World History, An Autobiography and The Discovery of India, none of them devotional translation.
• Option (d) fails because Sarojini Naidu wrote original English verse such as The Golden Threshold and The Bird of Time. Hence (c). The distinguishing test is the combination of prison authorship with religious translation, which points to Gandhi's Yeravda output.

The three were officers of the Indian National Army tried jointly by court martial at the Red Fort in late 1945, in a trial that became a national cause because the accused were deliberately drawn one each from the Muslim, Hindu and Sikh communities, and the defence was conducted by Bhulabhai Desai, Tej Bahadur Sapru, Asaf Ali and Nehru. The resulting agitation is regarded as a significant factor in the British reassessment of the loyalty of Indian forces.

• Option (d) is therefore correct.
• Options (a), (b) and (c) attach the trio to movements and bodies with which none of them is associated. Hence (d). The communal composition of the accused is the detail that makes the episode memorable and is frequently the hook for questions on it.

Rash Behari Bose was the figure who linked the Ghadar movement to revolutionary networks inside India. He was central to the plan for a general rising in February 1915, coordinated with Ghadarites returning from North America, and after its betrayal and collapse he escaped to Japan, where he continued to work for Indian independence and later helped found the Indian Independence League.

• Item 3 therefore qualifies.
• Item 1, Barindra Kumar Ghosh, belonged to an earlier and separate Bengal tradition; younger brother of Aurobindo, he organised the Manicktolla garden group and was tried in the Alipore bomb case of 1908, and his activity predates and stands apart from the Ghadar Party founded in 1913.
• Item 2, Jogesh Chandra Chatterjee, was an Anushilan Samiti man who became a founder of the Hindustan Republican Association and was convicted in the Kakori conspiracy case, again a distinct organisational lineage. Only item 3 qualifies, giving (d).
• Options (a), (b) and (c) each attach a Bengal revolutionary to a movement whose base lay among Punjabi emigrants on the Pacific coast of North America.

• Statement I is correct. National Handloom Day has been observed on the seventh of August since 2015.
• Statement II is correct. The Swadeshi Movement was formally launched at a meeting in the Calcutta Town Hall on the seventh of August 1905, in response to the announcement of the partition of Bengal, with the boycott of foreign cloth as its central plank.
• Statement II is also the correct explanation for Statement I, since the date was chosen precisely to commemorate the Swadeshi launch and to link the modern handloom sector with the boycott of imported textiles and the revival of indigenous production. That explanatory link makes the answer (a) rather than (b).
• Options (c) and (d) each require one of two well documented dates to be wrong.