BPSC 70th CCE Re-exam Prelims General Studies · Question 41 of 142

Correct — B, Rajendra Prasad. Bose held the Congress presidency twice in succession: from 18 January 1938, when he presided at the Haripura session, and again from 29 January 1939, after he won a contested re-election against Pattabhi Sitaramayya, the candidate Gandhi had backed. The second term lasted three months. At Tripuri in March 1939 the Congress old guard forced a confrontation, and all but three of the fifteen members of the Working Committee resigned rather than serve under him — the three exceptions being Bose himself, his brother Sarat Bose, and Jawaharlal Nehru. Left without an executive, Bose resigned the presidency on 29 April 1939, and Dr RAJENDRA PRASAD was chosen to take his place and complete the 1939 term. Bose went on to organise the All India Forward Bloc on 22 June 1939 and was expelled from Congress office. Prasad was no stranger to the chair: he had been Congress President once before, at the Bombay session of October 1934, and would hold it a third time from 17 November 1947, when J. B. Kripalani resigned. He is also the Bihar name on this page — born at Ziradei in what is now Siwan district on 3 December 1884, Gandhi's principal lieutenant in the Champaran satyagraha of 1917, arrested at Sadaqat Ashram in Patna after the Quit India resolution of 8 August 1942 and jailed at Bankipur until 15 June 1945, President of the Constituent Assembly from 11 December 1946, and finally the first President of the Republic of India. Because exactly one of the three named leaders is correct, option (d) cannot stand: an escape option of that kind is available only when at least two of the other options are simultaneously true, and here Nehru and Azad both fail on their dates.

• (a)Jawahar Lal Nehru — Wrong year every time. Nehru presided over the Lahore session of 1929, at which the Purna Swaraj resolution was adopted, then over Lucknow in 1936 and Faizpur in 1937, and again in 1946. In 1939 he was one of only three Working Committee members who did not resign in the revolt against Bose — present at the centre of the crisis, but not the man who inherited the office.
• (c)Abul Kalam Azad — The sharpest trap, because it is off by a single year. Azad was elected Congress President at the RAMGARH session in 1940 — then in Bihar province, now in Jharkhand — and held the office continuously through the war years to 1946, the longest presidency of the period. A candidate who remembers 'Azad led the Congress in the early 1940s' will reach for him here, one term too early.
• (d)More than one of the above — This works only if two or more of (a), (b) and (c) are true at once, and here they are mutually exclusive — one person held the office at any moment, and after 29 April 1939 that person was Rajendra Prasad. Nehru's terms and Azad's term fall on either side of it, which is the arrangement that makes the option look tempting without making it correct.

The Congress presidency between 1938 and 1940 is the hinge of the party's internal politics on the eve of the Second World War, and it is examined more often than any other stretch of the office. Bose, elected at Haripura in 1938 with Gandhi's approval, stood again in January 1939 against Gandhi's wishes and won. The dispute was substantive as well as personal: Bose wanted an ultimatum to the British and was suspicious that the old guard would compromise on the federation scheme of the Government of India Act 1935, while the leadership objected to his readiness to loosen the commitment to non-violence and to concentrate authority in his own hands. The Tripuri session in March 1939 passed a resolution asking Bose to nominate a Working Committee in accordance with Gandhi's wishes; when he could not, he resigned. The immediate consequences were the Forward Bloc, formed in June 1939, and Azad's long war-time presidency from Ramgarh in 1940 — the presidency under which the Congress rejected the war effort, launched Individual Satyagraha in 1940 and passed the Quit India resolution in 1942.

Succession questions of this type are answered by holding a short chain rather than isolated facts, and for the Congress presidency the chain around 1939 is: Nehru 1936 and 1937, Bose 1938 Haripura and 1939 Tripuri, Rajendra Prasad completing 1939, Azad 1940 Ramgarh through 1946, Kripalani 1946 to 1947, Prasad again from November 1947. Learn it as a run of six and every question in this decade — who presided at partition, who presided at Quit India, who succeeded Bose — falls out of the same list. The single discriminating fact on this page is that Azad's term began in 1940 and not in 1939; get that one year right and the question is over. The Bihar reader has an extra anchor: the man who took the chair in 1939 was from Siwan, and the session that elected his successor was held at Ramgarh, then within Bihar province. Both details are the kind a State commission likes to test.

• Bose's two Congress presidencies ran from 18 January 1938 (Haripura) and from 29 January 1939 (Tripuri); he resigned the second on 29 April 1939.
• All but three of the fifteen Congress Working Committee members resigned rather than serve under Bose after his re-election; the exceptions were Bose, his brother Sarat Bose and Jawaharlal Nehru.
• Rajendra Prasad was Congress President three times — Bombay 1934, in 1939 after Bose's resignation, and from 17 November 1947 after J. B. Kripalani resigned.
• Abul Kalam Azad was elected at the Ramgarh session of 1940 — Ramgarh was then in Bihar province — and held the office through the war to 1946.
• Bose organised the All India Forward Bloc on 22 June 1939; Rajendra Prasad, born at Ziradei in Siwan district on 3 December 1884, later became the first President of India.

• Answering Abul Kalam Azad. His presidency began at Ramgarh in 1940, the year after Bose's resignation — a one-year offset that this question is built on.
• Assuming Nehru must have stepped in because he was the other tall figure of the period. He was one of the three who did not resign from the Working Committee, but he did not take the chair.
• Confusing Bose's resignation from the Congress presidency in April 1939 with his later expulsion from Congress office and his escape from India in January 1941.

BPSC asks the freedom struggle as who-and-when recall and reaches for Bihar figures wherever it can — Rajendra Prasad, Anugrah Narayan Sinha, Shri Krishna Singh — so a named-office question like this one is squarely in its style, with 'More than one of the above' added as a fourth option in place of a fourth name. UPSC prefers to test the same period through consequence rather than office: which party Bose founded after resigning, which leader saw the war as an opportunity, who was Congress President at the moment of partition.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  At which session was Subhas Chandra Bose re-elected President of the Indian National Congress in 1939 ?

  • (a)Haripura
  • (b)Tripuri
  • (c)Ramgarh
  • (d)Faizpur

  Answer(b) Tripuri — Haripura was his first presidency in 1938, Ramgarh elected Azad in 1940, and Faizpur was Nehru's session in 1937.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Who was the President of the Indian National Congress at the Ramgarh session of 1940 ?

  • (a)Rajendra Prasad
  • (b)Subhas Chandra Bose
  • (c)Abul Kalam Azad
  • (d)J. B. Kripalani

  Answer(c) Abul Kalam Azad — elected at Ramgarh in 1940, then in Bihar province, he held the office through the war years until 1946. Kripalani succeeded him in 1946.