BPSC 69th CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 109 of 144

Correct — A, a b c d 1 3 4 2. Take the four parties in the order List–I gives them. (a) The Communist Party of India (Marxist) dates its own formation to 7 November 1964, the closing day of its founding Congress — the Seventh Congress, held at Calcutta — which elected a Central Committee around P. Sundarayya (its first General Secretary), E. M. S. Namboodiripad, B. T. Ranadive, Jyoti Basu, Promode Dasgupta, Harkishan Singh Surjeet, M. Basavapunnaiah and Hare Krishna Konar. The party's own Programme puts the date on the record in paragraph 1.10: it “was formed after a prolonged struggle against revisionism” and “adopted the Party programme in 1964”. So a–1. (b) The Communist Party of India was founded on 26 December 1925 at its first Party Conference in Kanpur — then spelt Cawnpore — and the event is documented from outside the party as well as inside it. David Petrie's official intelligence survey Communism in India 1924–1927 records that “the Communist Conference was held at Cawnpore during the last week of 1925 at the same time and place as the session of the Indian National Congress”, that about 500 people attended, and that it elected an Executive Committee “which included Singaravelu, Satya Bhakta, Hasrat Mohani, K. N. Joglekar, R. S. Nimbkar, S. V. Ghate, Janki Prasad Begerhotta, Arjun Lal Sethi, Muzaffar Ahmad, Radha Mohan Gokulji and others”, before resolving to move the headquarters to Bombay, where S. V. Ghate became General Secretary. Its provisional rules set the objects as “to secure the freedom of India by all practicable means”, “to end all sorts of exploitation of man by man”, and “to establish a workers' and farmers' republic through the nationalisation of the means and instruments of production and distribution”. The CPI still observes 26 December as its formation day. So b–3. (c) The Bahujan Samaj Party was launched by Kanshi Ram on 14 April 1984, chosen because it is Dr B. R. Ambedkar's birth anniversary, out of the cadre platform he had already built as the Dalit Shoshit Samaj Sangharsh Samiti and, before that, BAMCEF. So c–4. (d) The All India Trinamool Congress was founded on 1 January 1998 by Mamata Banerjee as a breakaway faction of the Indian National Congress, with its headquarters at 30B Harish Chatterjee Street, Kolkata; “trinamool” is Bengali for grassroots. So d–2. The sequence is therefore 1, 3, 4, 2, which is option (a) — and it is the only option that keeps the parent party older than the party that split away from it.

• (b)a b c d 2 1 4 3 — Gets the BSP right at 1984 and nothing else. It dates the CPI to 1964 — the year the CPI split, not the year it was born — and hands the CPI(M) Mamata Banerjee's 1998 and the AITC the Kanpur date of 1925, twenty-two years before Independence and long before the party's parent Congress had a Bengal faction to break from. The single correct pair is the danger: a candidate who checks only the BSP will find it right and mark the option, which is exactly why a match-list must be tested on the pair you are surest of, not the first one you happen to look at.
• (c)a b c d 2 1 3 4 — Repeats the same inverted communist pair as (b) — CPI(M) 1998, CPI 1964 — and then puts the Bahujan Samaj Party in 1925, eleven years before Ambedkar's own Independent Labour Party of 1936 and half a century before the Bahujan mobilisation Kanshi Ram built the party on. It also pushes the AITC back to 1984, fourteen years before Mamata Banerjee left the Congress and while she was still a Congress member of the Lok Sabha. Not one of its four pairs survives a date check, which makes it the weakest option on the card.
• (d)a b c d 3 4 1 2 — The most plausible-looking wrong option, because it alone gets the AITC's 1998 right and so feels anchored at one end. But it awards the CPI(M) the CPI's own Kanpur year of 1925 and pushes the CPI itself to 1984, and it gives the BSP 1964 — twenty years before Kanshi Ram founded it, and fourteen years before he founded BAMCEF, the employees' federation out of which the party grew. Every communist date in it is displaced by one slot, and it fails the parent-before-offshoot test in the most extreme way of the four, making the splinter older than the party it split from by fifty-nine years — 1984 against 1925. (The real gap between the two communist parties is thirty-nine years, 1925 to 1964, which is the number this option is designed to make you reach for.)

The four parties in this list belong to two quite different waves of Indian party formation. The first is the communist lineage: the Communist Party of India was constituted at Kanpur on 26 December 1925 — a fractious founding, held in a tent after the Congress refused the communists its pandal, and one that immediately moved the party's headquarters to Bombay — and the ideological quarrel over how to treat Congress governments and over the Sino-Soviet dispute tore it in two in 1964, producing the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The proximate trigger was the walkout of 32 members from the CPI National Council in April 1964; the Calcutta Congress that November formalised the new party. The second wave is the social-justice and regional surge of the late twentieth century. The Bahujan Samaj Party (1984) was built on Kanshi Ram's argument that Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes and minorities together formed a bahujan majority of roughly 85 per cent that was politically unorganised, and it grew out of two earlier bodies he had built — BAMCEF, the employees' federation, and the DS-4 agitational front. The All India Trinamool Congress (1998) is a Congress splinter that became the dominant force in West Bengal, ending 34 years of Left Front government in 2011. Recognition as a “national party” is a separate matter altogether from existence. It is conferred by the Election Commission under the Election Symbols (Reservation and Allotment) Order, 1968, on performance thresholds — vote share and seats across States — and it can be withdrawn, which is precisely what happened to three parties in April 2023.

One structural fact settles this question without your having to recall four dates. The CPI(M) is a splinter of the CPI, so the CPI must be the older of the two — whatever the years are, the CPI's year has to come before the CPI(M)'s. Check that single relation against the codes: option (b) gives CPI(M) 1998 and CPI 1964; option (c) gives CPI(M) 1998 and CPI 1964 again; option (d) gives CPI(M) 1925 and CPI 1984. All three invert parent and offshoot. Only option (a), with CPI 1925 and CPI(M) 1964, survives, and you never had to place the BSP or the AITC at all. That is the general method for a four-pair code match, and it is worth stating as a rule: look for a relation between two entries — parent and splinter, cause and effect, older and newer — rather than four independent facts, because a relation is one thing to remember and it eliminates in bulk. The trap the question is built on is that 1964 is the year most candidates associate with the Communist Party of India, because it is the year of the famous split. But a split is an event in a party's middle age, not its birth, and the Kanpur conference of 1925 is thirty-nine years earlier. The same confusion in reverse would make the AITC older than the Congress it broke from. Note also that List–II is deliberately scrambled out of chronological order — 1964, 1998, 1925, 1984 — so a candidate who assumes the years run oldest-to-newest down the column will mispair everything. BPSC scrambles the second column on almost every match-list; treat an apparently ordered List–II as the exception, not the rule.

• Communist Party of India — founded 26 December 1925 at its first Party Conference in Kanpur (then Cawnpore); S. V. Ghate was its first General Secretary and the headquarters moved at once to Bombay.
• Contemporary official corroboration: David Petrie's Communism in India 1924–1927 records the Cawnpore conference of “the last week of 1925”, about 500 attending, and names the executive elected — Singaravelu, Satya Bhakta, Hasrat Mohani, Joglekar, Nimbkar, Ghate, Bagerhatta, Arjun Lal Sethi, Muzaffar Ahmad and others.
• A rival dating exists and is worth knowing: the CPI(M) treats 17 October 1920, when M. N. Roy, Evelyn Trent-Roy, Abani Mukherji, Rosa Fitingov, Mohd. Ali, Mohamad Shafiq and M. P. T. Acharya met at Tashkent, as the CPI's founding day. The CPI itself dates from Kanpur 1925, and 1925 is the only communist-origin year List–II offers.
• Communist Party of India (Marxist) — 7 November 1964, at the Calcutta (Seventh) Congress, after 32 members walked out of the CPI National Council in April that year; P. Sundarayya first General Secretary. Paragraph 1.10 of the party's own Programme records that it “adopted the Party programme in 1964”.
• Bahujan Samaj Party — 14 April 1984, Ambedkar's birth anniversary, founded by Kanshi Ram; its predecessor bodies are BAMCEF (1978) and the Dalit Shoshit Samaj Sangharsh Samiti. Kanshi Ram reckoned the bahujan at about 85 per cent of India's population, split across some 6,000 castes.
• All India Trinamool Congress — 1 January 1998, founded by Mamata Banerjee as a breakaway from the Indian National Congress; headquarters 30B Harish Chatterjee Street, Kolkata; it ended 34 years of Left Front rule in West Bengal in 2011.
• Recognition is not the same as existence: by an Election Commission order of 10 April 2023 the AITC, the CPI and the Nationalist Congress Party lost recognition as national parties and the Aam Aadmi Party gained it. Five months later, when this paper was set, only the CPI(M) and the BSP among the four listed parties were recognised national parties; the CPI was a State party in Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Manipur.

• Answering 1964 for the Communist Party of India. 1964 is the year the CPI(M) split away; the CPI itself dates from Kanpur, 26 December 1925.
• Reaching for 1920 for the CPI. The Tashkent meeting of 17 October 1920 is the CPI(M)'s preferred founding date for the CPI, but the year in List–II is 1925, the CPI's own.
• Assuming List–II runs in chronological order. It is scrambled — 1964, 1998, 1925, 1984 — which is exactly what makes a hurried straight-down pairing wrong.

BPSC likes the party-and-year match-list and the flat one-liner — who founded it, in which year, in which city — and it mixes national parties with the Bihar-specific RJD, JD(U) and LJP, so a Bihar aspirant needs those founding dates as securely as these four. UPSC almost never asks a bare founding year; it asks instead about the machinery around parties — the criteria for recognition as a national party, registration under Section 29A of the Representation of the People Act, 1951, state funding and electoral bonds — so the same syllabus corner is tested as institutional law rather than as recall. Prepare the dates for BPSC and the Symbols Order thresholds for UPSC, and neither paper can surprise you here.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Communist Party of India was founded at its first Party Conference held in which city?

  • (a)Kanpur
  • (b)Tashkent
  • (c)Calcutta
  • (d)Bombay

  Answer(a) Kanpur — 26 December 1925, then spelt Cawnpore, with S. V. Ghate as first General Secretary.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  By its order of April 2023, the Election Commission of India withdrew recognition as a national party from which of the following?

  • (a)All India Trinamool Congress, Communist Party of India and Nationalist Congress Party
  • (b)Bahujan Samaj Party and Communist Party of India (Marxist)
  • (c)Aam Aadmi Party and National People's Party
  • (d)Indian National Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party

  Answer(a) All India Trinamool Congress, Communist Party of India and Nationalist Congress Party — the same order of 10 April 2023 recognised the Aam Aadmi Party as a national party.