BPSC 70th CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 26 of 143

Correct — C, 16 August 1946. The All-India Muslim League observed Direct Action Day on 16 August 1946, a date its Working Committee fixed after the League withdrew its acceptance of the Cabinet Mission Plan. The sequence is what makes the date memorable rather than arbitrary. The Cabinet Mission of 1946 had proposed a united India with a three-tier structure and compulsory groupings of provinces, an arrangement designed to meet the League's demand for autonomy in Muslim-majority areas, and the League had accepted it on that understanding. Jawaharlal Nehru's statement of 10 July 1946, that the Congress would not consider itself bound by the grouping provision, removed the ground on which the League had accepted, and on 29 July Jinnah rescinded that acceptance and called for direct action. His own summary of the position was uncompromising: 'We will either have a divided India or a destroyed India.' What happened on the day itself is why it is examined. In Calcutta, where the Muslim League's Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy headed the Bengal ministry and had declared 16 August a public holiday, the observance turned into the communal violence remembered as the Great Calcutta Killings; within seventy-two hours more than four thousand people were dead and about a hundred thousand were left homeless. The violence then travelled — to Noakhali in eastern Bengal and from there to Bihar, the United Provinces and Punjab — and it is the moment at which partition stopped being a constitutional argument and became a fact on the ground.

• (a)14 August 1946 — 14 August 1946 — a date manufactured to look right, because 14 August is Pakistan's independence day and the year here is the right one for Direct Action Day. Put the two halves together and it feels familiar. But Pakistan's independence day is 14 August 1947, a full year later, and nothing of consequence occurred on 14 August 1946. Mixing a correct day and month from one event with a correct year from another is the standard way of building a date decoy.
• (b)15 August 1947 — 15 August 1947 — India's independence day, which is a year and a day after Direct Action Day and belongs to the end of the process rather than to a step within it. By that date the Indian Independence Act had already partitioned the country into two dominions. Any option that offers a famous national day in answer to a question about a League agitation of the preceding year should be treated with suspicion on that ground alone.
• (d)More than one of the above — More than one of the above — correct only if at least two of the three dates offered were true at the same time, and a single observance called on a single day cannot have two dates. Run the check anyway: 14 August 1946 is false, 15 August 1947 is false, 16 August 1946 is true. One correct date out of three is not more than one, so the option is eliminated by counting rather than by history.

The two years between the end of the Second World War and independence were a sequence of constitutional attempts, each of which failed and narrowed the options left. The Simla Conference of 1945 broke down over who could nominate Muslim members of the Viceroy's Executive Council. The Cabinet Mission of 1946 then proposed a united India in three tiers — a weak centre handling defence, foreign affairs and communications, groupings of provinces in the middle, and the provinces themselves — with a Constituent Assembly to be elected indirectly by the Provincial Legislative Assemblies. It is widely treated as the last serious plan for keeping India together, which is exactly why its collapse matters. Once the League withdrew on 29 July 1946 and the Congress went ahead into the Interim Government formed on 2 September, the negotiation moved from what kind of union to whether there would be one. Direct Action Day and the violence that followed through late 1946 destroyed whatever trust remained between the two organisations, and within ten months the Mountbatten Plan of 3 June 1947 and then the Indian Independence Act had converted the argument into two dominions.

The four options are three dates and an escape hatch, and the three dates are built from two famous anniversaries. Notice first that two of them, 14 and 15 August, are the independence days of Pakistan and India respectively — and that neither belongs to 1946. That observation alone disposes of options (a) and (b), because an examiner offering a national anniversary in answer to a question about a party agitation is offering a decoy. What is left is 16 August 1946, and it can be confirmed from the other end: the League withdrew from the Cabinet Mission Plan on 29 July 1946, and Direct Action Day followed within weeks, so the date must lie in August 1946 and not in 1947. Then apply the counting rule to option (d): a single day of observance has one date, so at most one of the three can be true. The wider habit worth taking from this question is to store the last two years before independence as an ordered chain rather than as loose dates — Cabinet Mission, League withdrawal on 29 July, Direct Action Day on 16 August, Interim Government on 2 September, Mountbatten Plan on 3 June 1947, independence on 15 August 1947.

• Direct Action Day was observed on 16 August 1946, called by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, with the Muslim League's Working Committee calling on Muslims across India to mark the date.
• It followed the League's withdrawal of its acceptance of the Cabinet Mission Plan on 29 July 1946, itself prompted by Nehru's statement of 10 July that the Congress would not be bound by the plan's compulsory provincial grouping.
• Jinnah's warning at the time was: 'We will either have a divided India or a destroyed India.'
• In Calcutta the day became the Great Calcutta Killings: within seventy-two hours more than 4,000 people were dead and about 100,000 were left homeless. Bengal's Muslim League premier, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, had declared the day a public holiday.
• The violence spread from Calcutta to Noakhali and then to Bihar, the United Provinces and Punjab over the following months.
• The two dates in the wrong options belong elsewhere: 14 August is Pakistan's independence day but in 1947, and 15 August 1947 is India's — a year and a day after Direct Action Day.

• Attaching the day and month of an independence anniversary to the wrong year. 14 August belongs to Pakistan's independence in 1947, not to any event of 1946.
• Confusing Direct Action Day with the Quit India call. Both fall in August, but Quit India was 8 August 1942 and was a Congress movement against the British; Direct Action Day was 16 August 1946 and was a Muslim League agitation over the Cabinet Mission Plan.
• Treating 'More than one of the above' as a hedge on a date question. One observance has one date, so at most one of the three can be correct.

BPSC asks the freedom struggle as exact dates, and builds the wrong options by recombining the day and month of one famous anniversary with the year of another, then closes the list with 'More than one of the above' to punish a candidate who narrows it to two. UPSC almost never asks the date of Direct Action Day; it asks the constitutional turning point around it — which plan's rejection lost the last chance to avoid partition, or what the Cabinet Mission actually recommended — so the same fortnight of 1946 has to be revised as a chain of causes for one paper and as a calendar for the other.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Muslim League withdrew its acceptance of the Cabinet Mission Plan chiefly because

  • (a)the plan provided for the immediate partition of India
  • (b)the Congress stated that it would not be bound by the plan's compulsory grouping of provinces
  • (c)the British Government refused to hold fresh elections
  • (d)the plan excluded Muslims from the Constituent Assembly

  Answer(b) the Congress stated that it would not be bound by the plan's compulsory grouping of provinces — Nehru's statement of 10 July 1946. The League rescinded its acceptance on 29 July and called Direct Action Day for 16 August.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Great Calcutta Killings of August 1946 took place when the Premier of Bengal was

  • (a)A. K. Fazlul Huq
  • (b)Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy
  • (c)Khwaja Nazimuddin
  • (d)Bidhan Chandra Roy

  Answer(b) Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy of the Muslim League, who had declared 16 August 1946 a public holiday in the province. Bidhan Chandra Roy became Chief Minister of West Bengal only after independence.