BPSC 71st CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 100 of 150

Correct — D, 4 1 2 3. Two of the four rows are settled beyond argument by the Government of Bihar's own official history, and between them they kill every other option. Row (a), Champaran Satyagraha, goes to 4, Dr. Rajendra Prasad: K. K. Datta's History of the Freedom Movement in Bihar, Vol. I, gives Chapter VI entirely to 'Mahatma's Mission in Champaran' and records that on the afternoon of 18 April 1917 Rajendra Prasad reached Motihari from Patna with Mazharul Haque, Braj Kishore Prasad, Anugraha Narain Sinha and Shambhusaran, to settle what the team would do once Gandhi was jailed. Rajendra Prasad's own account of the enquiry is quoted there: ryots 'came in large numbers to give their statements', and 'there was hardly a planter whose ryots had not come to us in their hundreds and had not acquainted us with the minutest details of their grievances'. Row (d), Kisan Sabha Bihar, goes to 3, Sahajanand Saraswati: Vol. II records the formal inauguration of a Kisan Sabha at Bihta Ashram in Patna district on 4 March 1928 by Swami Sahajanand Saraswati, who 'became the moving spirit behind the Kisan movement here'. Now look at what those two do to the codes. Only (a) and (d) begin with 4, so (b) and (c) are gone on the Champaran row alone. Option (a) then reads d–1, handing the Bihar Kisan Sabha to Jayaprakash Narayan, which the Kisan Sabha row forbids. Only (d) survives, and it happens to be right on the two remaining rows as well: Azad Dasta to 1, Jayaprakash Narayan, and the 1940 Individual Satyagraha in Bihar to 2, Shyam Narayan Singh. The Azad Dasta attribution is confirmed by the same official history, Vol. III: 'With the object of training bands of workers, Shri Jayprakash proceeded to Nepal with Shri Suraj Narayan Singh and Vijaya. Here he organised the Azad Dasta or guerilla bands for serving the whole country.' The Commission published no Remarks entry for this question, so the key stands as printed.

• (a)4 2 3 1 — Gets Champaran right (a–4, Rajendra Prasad) and then collapses on the last row: it assigns d, Kisan Sabha Bihar, to 1, Jayaprakash Narayan. The Bihar Kisan Sabha belongs to Sahajanand Saraswati, who inaugurated it at Bihta Ashram in 1928 and led the peasant movement in Bihar until his death. JP's organisational home was the Congress Socialist Party, founded in 1934, not the Kisan Sabha. This is the trap option — it is right on one anchor and wrong on the other, so a candidate who checks only Champaran stops too early.
• (b)2 3 1 4 — Fails on the very first row: it pairs a, Champaran Satyagraha, with 2, Shyam Narayan Singh. Champaran is the most heavily documented episode in Bihar's freedom history and the Bihar Government's own account names Rajendra Prasad on the ground at Motihari from 18 April 1917. This option also sends the Kisan Sabha to Rajendra Prasad, compounding the error.
• (c)1 4 3 2 — Pairs a, Champaran Satyagraha, with 1, Jayaprakash Narayan — a chronological impossibility as an active association. The Champaran enquiry ran from April 1917, when JP was a schoolboy of about fourteen; he entered public life through the Congress Socialist Party in the 1930s. It also gives the Azad Dasta to Rajendra Prasad, who was a constitutionalist Congress leader and never led an underground guerrilla formation.

This row of the paper is really about the four distinct channels through which Bihar fought the British, each with its own leader and its own method. Champaran 1917 was a legal-investigative satyagraha: Gandhi and a team of Bihari lawyers recorded thousands of ryot statements against the tinkathia indigo system, and the state answered with the Champaran Agrarian Committee. The Bihar Kisan Sabha was a class organisation rather than a national one — Sahajanand Saraswati built it out of the grievances of tenants over rent, canal rates and eviction, and it eventually pulled against the Congress leadership as much as with it. Individual Satyagraha, from October 1940, was the opposite of a mass movement by design: Gandhi picked resisters one at a time so the campaign would stay symbolic while the war was on, and each satyagrahi had to notify the District Magistrate before offering resistance. The Azad Dasta belonged to the last and most radical channel — the underground of 1942, where socialists who rejected both petitioning and non-violence built guerrilla bands. Bihar contains all four, which is why BPSC can build a match-list question entirely out of one state's history.

Treat a four-row match-list as a code-elimination problem, not a memory test — you almost never need all four rows. Start with whichever row you are surest of. Here that is Champaran to Rajendra Prasad, and it does half the work at once: only (a) and (d) place 4 against a, so two options die immediately. Now find a second anchor that separates the survivors. Compare (a) and (d) row by row: they agree nowhere else, so any one of the remaining three rows decides it. The cheapest is the Kisan Sabha, because Sahajanand Saraswati is famous for exactly one thing and it is this. Option (a) gives the Kisan Sabha to Jayaprakash Narayan; option (d) gives it to Sahajanand. That single fact ends the question, and you never had to know who Shyam Narayan Singh was. The habit worth building is this: locate the row where the two surviving codes disagree, and spend your certainty there. The trap in this question is (a), and it is well built — it concedes the famous row and hides the error in the row a hurried candidate treats as already answered.

• Champaran, April 1917: the Bihar Government's own history records Rajendra Prasad arriving at Motihari from Patna on 18 April 1917 with Mazharul Haque, Braj Kishore Prasad, Anugraha Narain Sinha and Shambhusaran; the team took statements from ryots across the whole district, planter by planter.
• Kisan Sabha: a Kisan Sabha was formally inaugurated at Bihta Ashram, Patna district, on 4 March 1928 by Swami Sahajanand Saraswati. He went on to head the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha and became the first president of the All India Kisan Sabha in 1936.
• Azad Dasta: organised by Jayaprakash Narayan in Nepal, which — lying outside British Indian territory — was meant to be its all-India centre. The Bihar provincial council was under Suraj Narayan Singh and Ram Manohar Lohia ran its radio and publicity work; JP, Lohia and others were arrested in May 1943 and held in Hanumannagar Jail.
• Individual Satyagraha began on 17 October 1940 with Vinoba Bhave at Paunar near Wardha, arrested on the 21st; Jawaharlal Nehru was chosen as the second satyagrahi and was arrested at Cheoki on 31 October 1940 and sentenced to four years. Gandhi's written instructions to the Provincial Congress Committees are dated 9 November 1940.
• Rajendra Prasad did not offer Individual Satyagraha in 1940 at all — Gandhi asked him to stay out on health grounds, and he spent much of the period at Sevagram helping run the campaign. That is a useful check against pairing him with the 1940 row.

• Assuming a match-list needs all four rows. Two solid rows usually collapse the codes; find the row where the surviving options disagree and decide it there.
• Reading the heading 'Related Person' as 'the person who started it'. Individual Satyagraha in Bihar was actually begun by Shri Krishna Sinha, on 28 November 1940 at Patna — but he is not among the four names offered, so that fact does not touch this code.
• Pairing Jayaprakash Narayan with the Kisan Sabha because both are Bihar and both are left-wing. JP's organisation was the Congress Socialist Party; the Kisan Sabha was Sahajanand Saraswati's.

BPSC likes to build the whole match-list out of Bihar, so a single state's chronology has to carry four different movements at once, and it usually leaves one row that no standard textbook covers — here Shyam Narayan Singh — expecting you to reach it by elimination rather than recall. UPSC asks the same pairing skill but spreads it across India and phrases it as 'which of the pairs given above is/are correctly matched', which forces you to judge every pair on its own instead of letting the code do the eliminating.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Who was chosen as the first satyagrahi when the Congress launched Individual Satyagraha in October 1940?

  • (a)Jawaharlal Nehru
  • (b)Vinoba Bhave
  • (c)Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel
  • (d)C. Rajagopalachari

  Answer(b) Vinoba Bhave — he offered satyagraha at Paunar, about seven miles from Wardha, on 17 October 1940, was arrested on 21 October and sentenced to three months. Jawaharlal Nehru was selected as the second satyagrahi and was arrested at Cheoki on 31 October 1940.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Swami Sahajanand Saraswati is chiefly associated with which of the following?

  • (a)The Congress Socialist Party
  • (b)The Kisan Sabha movement
  • (c)The Home Rule League in Bihar
  • (d)The Bihar Vidyapith

  Answer(b) The Kisan Sabha movement — he inaugurated a Kisan Sabha at Bihta Ashram in Patna district on 4 March 1928, led the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha through the 1930s and became the first president of the All India Kisan Sabha in 1936. The Congress Socialist Party was founded in 1934 with Acharya Narendra Deva as president and Jayaprakash Narayan as general secretary.