BPSC 71st CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 82 of 150

Correct — A, Indian Government and Gandhiji. The enquiry committee was the settlement of a stand-off between the colonial administration and Gandhi personally, and the Commission's own remark on this question puts it in one sentence: Gandhi led the Champaran movement and represented the peasants in the Champaran Agrarian Committee, which examined their grievances. Follow the sequence and the answer is forced. Gandhi went to Champaran in 1917 on the invitation of a local cultivator, Raj Kumar Shukla, to investigate the indigo tenants' grievances. The district authorities served him with an order to leave; he refused to go and chose instead to face the penalty — the first act of civil disobedience he ever committed on Indian soil, and the moment the confrontation became a matter between the Government and one named man rather than between planters and tenants. The Government backed down, and out of that climb-down came a Government commission of inquiry with Gandhi seated on it as the cultivators' representative. That is the body the question calls the Champaran Agrarian Committee, and it was constituted by the provincial Government of Bihar and Orissa. Its work produced a negotiated settlement under which the planters had to refund the tenants 25 per cent of the money they had illegally exacted, and — far more important in the long run — the tinkathia obligation to plant indigo as a condition of tenancy was dismantled. The reform was then written into statute as the Champaran Agrarian Act, 1918, and within about a decade the planters had left the region altogether. None of the other three men, however central they were to the satyagraha itself, was the party the Government dealt with when it agreed to set up the committee.

• (b)Indian Government and Raj Kumar Shukla — Raj Kumar Shukla is the man without whom none of it happens — a Champaran cultivator who pursued Gandhi with an invitation until Gandhi agreed to come and see the indigo tenants' condition for himself. That earns him a permanent place in the story, and it is why the option is placed first among the wrong three. But he was a peasant petitioner, not a negotiator: he had no standing to conclude an arrangement with the provincial Government, and the enquiry committee was constituted after Gandhi's confrontation with the administration, not before it.
• (c)Indian Government and Rajendra Prasad — Rajendra Prasad (1884–1963) was one of the Bihar lawyers who left his practice to join Gandhi's Champaran investigation, alongside Brajkishore Prasad, Mazharul Haq, Anugrah Narayan Sinha, Ramnavmi Prasad, J. B. Kripalani and Mahadev Desai, and he went on to become President of the Constituent Assembly and the first President of India. He was Gandhi's colleague in the enquiry, not the Government's counterparty in setting it up — and note the recurring UPSC trap that it was Shukla, not Rajendra Prasad, who brought Gandhi to Champaran.
• (d)Indian Government and Anugraha Narayan Singh — Anugrah Narayan Sinha (18 June 1887 – 5 July 1957), 'Bihar Vibhuti', gave up a flourishing law practice in 1917 to join the Champaran satyagraha and later became Deputy Premier and Finance Minister of Bihar province in the ministry sworn in on 20 July 1937, and Bihar's first Deputy Chief Minister from 1946. In 1917, though, he was a young recruit to Gandhi's team of investigators, not a principal in an agreement with the Government of Bihar and Orissa.

Champaran was a tenancy problem before it was a national one. Under the leases that European planters held over land in the district, tenant farmers were bound to grow indigo on a fixed fraction of every holding as a condition of their tenancy — the tinkathia system, whose name records the 'three kathas' of obligation. The economics then turned against the planters: German chemists synthesised artificial dye, natural indigo collapsed in value, and rather than absorb the loss the planters released tenants from the obligation in exchange for higher rents or a lump-sum payment. The First World War cut off German dye, indigo became profitable again, and the planters revived the old compulsion on tenants who had already paid to escape it. That double squeeze — pay to get out, then be forced back in — is the specific grievance Gandhi walked into in 1917. What made Champaran historically decisive was not the tenancy law but the method: Gandhi conducted a mass recording of testimony, refused an order to leave the district, offered to take the punishment rather than obey, and then converted the Government's retreat into a formal enquiry on which he himself sat for the peasants. It was his first satyagraha in India and the first time an agrarian grievance was joined directly to the national movement.

The question is testing whether you can distinguish the four roles people played in one famous episode, and BPSC has deliberately built the options so that every name is genuinely a Champaran name. Read the stem's exact wording — 'appointed in agreement between' the Indian Government and someone. That phrasing asks who the Government treated with, and government agreements are made with the person whose defiance created the crisis. Rank the four by standing rather than by fame: Raj Kumar Shukla was the petitioner who fetched Gandhi; Rajendra Prasad and Anugrah Narayan Sinha were volunteer lawyers on the investigating team; Gandhi was the man served with the order to quit the district, the man who refused, and the man the administration had to deal with. That is the discriminator — not who worked hardest in Champaran, but who was the other party to the Government's climb-down. A second check confirms it: Gandhi is the only one of the four who then sat on the committee itself, representing the cultivators, which is exactly what the Commission's remark says. If you remember only one line of Champaran, remember that Gandhi was both the counterparty to the agreement and a member of the body it created.

• The Champaran Satyagraha of 1917 was Gandhi's first satyagraha in India; he went to the district on the invitation of the cultivator Raj Kumar Shukla and was joined by Rajendra Prasad, Brajkishore Prasad, Mazharul Haq, Anugrah Narayan Sinha, Ramnavmi Prasad, J. B. Kripalani and Mahadev Desai.
• The grievance was the tinkathia system — a lease condition compelling tenants to plant indigo on a fixed fraction of their holding; German synthetic dye had destroyed indigo's value, and the war-time revival of demand let planters reimpose the obligation on tenants who had already paid to be released from it.
• Ordered out of Champaran, Gandhi refused and offered to accept the punishment — his first act of civil disobedience on Indian soil — and the Government then constituted a commission of inquiry on which he served as the peasants' representative.
• The settlement required the planters to refund 25 per cent of the money illegally exacted from the tenants and ended the tinkathia obligation; the reform was enacted as the Champaran Agrarian Act, 1918, and within about a decade the planters had left the district.
• Champaran was a district of the province of Bihar and Orissa, carved out of Saran district in 1866 with its headquarters at Motihari; it is today the two districts of East Champaran (Motihari) and West Champaran (Bettiah).

• Answering 'Raj Kumar Shukla' because he is the Champaran name most strongly associated with initiating the episode — initiating it and being party to an agreement with the Government are two different things
• Believing Rajendra Prasad persuaded Gandhi to come to Champaran; it was Raj Kumar Shukla, and UPSC has asked exactly this
• Dating Champaran to the Non-Cooperation era — it is 1917, before the Rowlatt agitation, and the resulting statute is the Champaran Agrarian Act of 1918

BPSC works the Bihar episode at close range and expects role-level precision: who invited Gandhi, who negotiated, who sat on the committee, which Act followed. The four options are all real Champaran figures, so recognition alone fails. UPSC pitches the same episode at a higher altitude — the significance of Champaran for the national movement, or a two-statement check that catches candidates who swap Raj Kumar Shukla for Rajendra Prasad — and it tests the participants through matching pairs rather than by naming a signatory.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Champaran Satyagraha of 1917 was directed against which of the following systems of compulsory cultivation ?

  • (a)Tinkathia
  • (b)Ryotwari
  • (c)Mahalwari
  • (d)Permanent Settlement

  Answer(a) Tinkathia — the lease condition binding a Champaran tenant to plant indigo on a fixed fraction of his holding. Ryotwari, Mahalwari and the Permanent Settlement are land-revenue settlements, not crop obligations.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Under the settlement that followed the Champaran enquiry, the indigo planters were required to refund to the tenants what proportion of the money illegally exacted from them ?

  • (a)10 per cent
  • (b)25 per cent
  • (c)50 per cent
  • (d)the entire amount

  Answer(b) 25 per cent — the refund was partial, but the settlement's lasting effect was the dismantling of the tinkathia obligation, carried into law by the Champaran Agrarian Act, 1918.