BPSC 69th CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 129 of 144

Correct — B, 2–4–1–3. Take the four events in turn and the sequence writes itself. The Surat Split (item 2) came first, at the Congress session of December 1907: the session was shifted from Nagpur to Surat, the Moderates put up Rash Behari Ghosh for president, and when the Extremists refused to accept the motion the session broke up in disorder and the Congress divided for the next nine years. The Minto–Morley Reforms (item 4) followed as the Indian Councils Act 1909, which received royal assent on 25 May 1909 and came into force on 15 November 1909, enlarging the legislative councils, admitting an Indian to the Viceroy's Executive Council for the first time in Satyendra Prasanna Sinha, and introducing separate electorates for Muslims. The Home Rule Movement (item 1) came next, in 1916: Tilak launched the Indian Home Rule League at the Bombay provincial conference at Belgaum in April 1916 and worked Maharashtra outside Bombay city, Karnataka, and the Central Provinces and Berar, while Annie Besant founded the All India Home Rule League at Adyar, Madras, in September 1916 and took the rest of the country, Bihar included. The Kheda Satyagraha (item 3) came last, running from 22 March to 5 June 1918 in Kheda district of Gujarat, where the Bombay government refused to suspend land revenue despite crop failure, famine and plague; Gandhi and Vallabhbhai Patel led a no-revenue campaign and the government finally suspended collection for that year and the next. So the order is 1907 → 1909 → 1916 → 1918, that is 2–4–1–3, which is option (b). One apparent difficulty is worth clearing up, because it is the only thing in this item that could reasonably trouble a careful candidate. The Home Rule Movement is not a single-day event: it ran on into 1918, overlapping Kheda, and its most dramatic moment — Besant's internment in June 1917, her release that September and her election as Congress President at the Calcutta session in December 1917 — falls between the two. Ordering questions are always settled on the date an event begins, and both Leagues were founded in 1916, two years before Kheda opened. So the overlap changes nothing: item 1 still precedes item 3, and no other option puts them in that relation while also getting the first two right.

• (a)1–3–2–4 — Reverses the two halves of the period completely: it puts the Home Rule Movement of 1916 and the Kheda Satyagraha of 1918 before the Surat Split of 1907 and the Minto–Morley Reforms of 1909. This is what a candidate picks who has learned the movements as a list of names without dates and who assumes the Gandhian campaigns are the older layer because they are taught earlier in a chapter. It is also the only option that gets no adjacent pair right, so a single correct date anywhere in the set kills it.
• (c)1–4–2–3 — Gets the tail right — Surat before Kheda — but opens with the Home Rule Movement, which is nine years too early, and then places Minto–Morley in 1909 ahead of the Surat Split of 1907, inverting the one pair that a candidate is most likely to know. The reforms of 1909 were in part a British response to the very unrest the 1907 split reflected; the concession follows the crisis, never the other way round.
• (d)2–3–1–4 — The most dangerous option, because it starts correctly with the Surat Split and a candidate who has verified only the first item will stop checking. It then goes wrong twice over: Kheda (1918) is placed second when it is in fact the last of the four, and the Minto–Morley Reforms of 1909 are pushed to the end, after 1918. Chronology questions are decided at the boundaries, not at the head — always test the last item as carefully as the first.

The four events span the eleven years in which Indian nationalism changed shape. The Swadeshi and Boycott agitation against the partition of Bengal in 1905 gave the Extremists their moment, and at Surat in December 1907 the Congress split into Moderates and Extremists over whether the older methods of petition and prayer could deliver anything. The British answered the unrest with a mix of concession and division: the Indian Councils Act 1909, negotiated between Secretary of State John Morley and Viceroy Lord Minto, widened the legislative councils and put an Indian on the Viceroy's Executive Council, while granting Muslims separate electorates — a step Congress read as divide and rule and which shaped constitutional argument down to 1947. The war years then reopened the field. Tilak, released in 1914, and Annie Besant built the two Home Rule Leagues in 1916, the same year the Lucknow session reunited the Extremists with the Moderates and produced the Congress–League pact; Besant's internment in June 1917 turned her into a national cause and she presided over the Calcutta Congress that December. Gandhi, back from South Africa in January 1915, ran his first three Indian campaigns in quick succession — Champaran in 1917, the Ahmedabad mill-workers' strike in 1918 and Kheda a week later — and by 1919 he, not the Home Rule Leagues, held the initiative.

A four-item chronology has six possible orderings that the four options sample, and the efficient way through is never to date all four. Find the pair the options disagree about most and settle that. Here every option is built around two blocks — the pre-war constitutional events (Surat 1907, Minto–Morley 1909) and the wartime and Gandhian ones (Home Rule 1916, Kheda 1918) — and two options open with the wrong block, so a single secure fact, that the Surat Split is the oldest of the four, removes (a) and (c) at once. That leaves (b) 2–4–1–3 and (d) 2–3–1–4, which differ only in where Kheda sits, and Kheda is the easiest date on the paper if you remember that it came a week after the Ahmedabad mill strike and a year after Champaran — 1917, 1918, 1918. The single discriminating fact is therefore that Kheda is last, not second. Two habits are worth taking from this item. First, anchor the whole period on Gandhi's return in January 1915: nothing Gandhian can precede it. Second, remember that a reform usually follows an agitation, so a British statute is rarely the earliest thing in a mixed list — Minto–Morley answered the Swadeshi years, Montagu–Chelmsford answered the war and the Home Rule Leagues, and the Government of India Act 1935 answered Civil Disobedience. There is a third habit specific to this paper. Notice how the four option strings are built: (a) and (c) both begin with 1, and (b) and (d) both begin with 2. Whenever an ordering question is constructed that way, the head of the sequence is a two-way choice and the answer is really being decided further down the string, so spend your time on positions two, three and four. A candidate who checks only the first item on this question has a fifty per cent chance and will feel certain — which is precisely the feeling the option design is engineered to produce.

• Surat Split, December 1907 — the session was shifted from Nagpur to Surat, the Moderates proposed Rash Behari Ghosh as president, the Extremists refused the motion, and the Congress broke into two wings that stayed apart until the Lucknow session of 1916
• Minto–Morley Reforms = the Indian Councils Act 1909 (9 Edw. 7 c. 4), royal assent 25 May 1909, in force 15 November 1909 — enlarged the legislative councils, brought Satyendra Prasanna Sinha onto the Viceroy's Executive Council as its first Indian member, and created separate electorates for Muslims
• Home Rule, 1916 — Tilak's Indian Home Rule League was founded at the Bombay provincial conference at Belgaum in April 1916 and grew from about 1,400 members to roughly 32,000 by 1917; Annie Besant's All India Home Rule League was founded at Adyar, Madras, in September 1916 and worked the rest of India, Bihar included
• Kheda Satyagraha, 22 March to 5 June 1918, in Kheda district of Gujarat — a no-revenue campaign after the Bombay government refused to suspend land revenue despite crop failure, famine and plague; Gandhi was assisted by Vallabhbhai Patel, Indulal Yagnik, Shankarlal Banker, Mahadev Desai, Narhari Parikh, Mohanlal Pandya and Ravi Shankar Vyas, and revenue was finally suspended for that year and the next
• The anchor date for the whole period: Gandhi returned from South Africa on 9 January 1915, so Champaran (1917), the Ahmedabad mill strike (February–March 1918) and Kheda (1918) all necessarily come after both the Surat Split and the Minto–Morley Reforms

• Dating the Home Rule Movement to 1915 or 1917; both Leagues were founded in 1916, Tilak's in April and Besant's in September
• Placing Minto–Morley before the Surat Split; the split came in December 1907 and the Act followed in 1909
• Confusing Kheda (1918, Gujarat, land revenue) with Champaran (1917, Bihar, indigo tinkathia) and putting the wrong one at the end of the sequence

Chronological ordering is a fixed feature of BPSC prelims, usually four events from a fifteen-to-twenty-year window with the option strings written so that two of them open correctly — which means the item is decided by the last two positions, not the first. It is worth noticing that this question reuses the exact option pattern of a UPSC 2004 item, right down to the correct string 2–4–1–3 and to Minto–Morley being item 2 there and item 4 here; state commissions draw on the UPSC bank, so solving old UPSC ordering questions is direct preparation. UPSC itself has largely moved on from four-item ordering to three-item ordering and to 'how many of the above' formats.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following is the correct chronological order of the events given below? 1. Lucknow Pact 2. Champaran Satyagraha 3. Partition of Bengal 4. Surat Split

  • (a)3–4–1–2
  • (b)4–3–2–1
  • (c)3–4–2–1
  • (d)4–1–3–2

  Answer(a) 3–4–1–2 — Partition of Bengal 1905, Surat Split December 1907, Lucknow Pact 1916, Champaran Satyagraha 1917.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following was NOT a feature of the Indian Councils Act, 1909?

  • (a)Enlargement of the imperial and provincial legislative councils
  • (b)Introduction of separate electorates for Muslims
  • (c)Appointment of an Indian to the Viceroy's Executive Council
  • (d)Introduction of dyarchy in the provinces

  Answer(d) Introduction of dyarchy in the provinces — dyarchy came with the Government of India Act 1919, the Montagu–Chelmsford reforms. The other three are all features of the 1909 Act, under which Satyendra Prasanna Sinha became the first Indian member of the Viceroy's Executive Council.