BPSC 71st CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 83 of 150

Correct — B, Sahajanand Saraswati. Swami Sahajanand Saraswati (22 February 1889 – 26 June 1950) is not merely a leader of the Kisan Sabha in Bihar; the Bihar Kisan Sabha is his creation. He founded the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha in 1929 to organise tenants against zamindari encroachment on their occupancy rights, and it was that provincial body, more than any other, that made an organised peasant movement thinkable across India. When the strands came together at the Lucknow session of the Indian National Congress in April 1936 and the All India Kisan Sabha was formed — with N. G. Ranga and E. M. S. Namboodiripad among its leading figures — Sahajanand was elected its first President. The Kisan Manifesto of August 1936 demanded the abolition of zamindari and the cancellation of rural debt; in October 1937 the Kisan Sabha adopted the red flag as its banner. His most concentrated Bihar campaign was the Bakasht movement of 1937–38 — 'bakasht' meaning self-cultivated land — against the eviction of tenants from bakasht holdings by zamindars, and it forced legislative response in the shape of the Bihar Tenancy Act and the Bakasht land tax. Note what that means politically: the Kisan Sabha was pressing a Congress provincial ministry, and its leaders drifted steadily away from the Congress and into confrontation with the Congress governments of Bihar and the United Provinces. He also led the workers' struggle at the Dalmia sugar mill at Bihta, where peasant and worker organisation met, and Bihta near Patna is where his ashram stood and where most of his later work was done. The arrest that produced 'Swami Sahajanand Day' came in April 1940, not during Quit India: the Government of Bihar's own history records that on 19 April 1940 he was arrested over three speeches in Patna district which the Government held to contain advice prejudicial to the prosecution of the war, and 28 April was observed in protest. Placing it in 1942 is doubly wrong, since Bose had left India for Germany by then.

• (a)Raj Kumar Shukla — The right province and the wrong movement. Raj Kumar Shukla was a Champaran indigo cultivator, and his place in history is that his persistent invitation brought Mahatma Gandhi to the district in 1917 to investigate the tenants' grievances. That was an individual petition on a district tenancy abuse, settled by a Government enquiry and the Champaran Agrarian Act, 1918 — a full decade before the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha existed, and organisationally nothing like it. Shukla never built a peasant organisation.
• (c)Acharya Narendra Dev — The best-informed wrong answer, and the one that catches good candidates. Acharya Narendra Deva (30 October 1889 – 19 February 1956) really was a peasant-movement leader and really did preside over the All-India Kisan Congress; he was also a founding theorist of the Congress Socialist Party from 1934, exactly the milieu Sahajanand worked in. But he was born at Sitapur, sat in the United Provinces legislative assembly, and his base was UP throughout — later Vice-Chancellor of Lucknow University (1947–51) and of Banaras Hindu University. Not Bihar.
• (d)Baba Ram Chandra — The right movement, the wrong province and the wrong decade. Baba Ram Chandra — born Shridhar Balwant, who spent years in Fiji as an indentured labourer before returning to India in 1916 and settling at Ayodhya — organised the peasants of Awadh into a united front against landlord exactions from 1920. That is the Oudh or Awadh Kisan Sabha of the Non-Cooperation years in the United Provinces, not the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha of 1929, and the two belong to different regions and different phases of agrarian politics.

The Kisan Sabha movement was the attempt to give India's tenants a permanent organisation of their own, distinct from the Congress, with demands of their own. Its grievances were structural rather than episodic: under the Permanent Settlement of 1793 in Bihar and Bengal the zamindar was recognised as proprietor, and although later tenancy legislation gave long-standing cultivators occupancy rights, landlords kept working around them through illegal cesses, rent enhancement and above all eviction. Provincial Kisan Sabhas grew up in that gap — the United Provinces Kisan Sabha of 1918, Baba Ram Chandra's Awadh organisation of 1920, and Swami Sahajanand Saraswati's Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha of 1929, which became the strongest of them. The all-India stage arrived with the All India Kisan Sabha at Lucknow in April 1936, whose Kisan Manifesto that August named the two demands the movement never gave up: abolish zamindari, cancel rural debt. From then on the Kisan Sabha's relationship with the Congress was uneasy. Once Congress ministries took office in 1937 the Sabha found itself agitating against a nationalist government, and its leadership moved leftwards, towards the Congress Socialists, the Communists and Bose's Forward Bloc. Zamindari abolition, when it came, was enacted by the States after independence — Bihar's own abolition legislation was among the first in the country.

This question is built on two axes at once, and the four options are placed so that failing on either axis costs you the mark. The stem contains two conditions — 'Kisan Sabha movement' and 'in Bihar' — and exactly one name satisfies both. Raj Kumar Shukla passes the Bihar test and fails the Kisan Sabha test: he is Champaran, 1917, an individual cultivator's appeal, not an organisation. Acharya Narendra Dev and Baba Ram Chandra pass the Kisan Sabha test and fail the Bihar test: both are United Provinces men, Narendra Dev the Congress Socialist theorist who presided over the All-India Kisan Congress, Baba Ram Chandra the organiser of the Awadh peasants from 1920. Only Sahajanand Saraswati is a Kisan Sabha man AND a Bihar man — and the association is founder-level, not incidental. The single discriminating fact to carry into the exam hall is the date-and-place pair: Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha, 1929, Sahajanand Saraswati; All India Kisan Sabha, Lucknow, April 1936, Sahajanand Saraswati as first President. A useful cross-check for those who blank on the name: he was born in Ghazipur district in eastern UP, so a candidate who tries to eliminate by birthplace will eliminate the correct answer. It is where a leader worked, not where he was born, that these questions are about.

• Swami Sahajanand Saraswati (22 February 1889 – 26 June 1950), born Naurang Rai in Deva village near Dullahpur in Ghazipur district of eastern UP, founded the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha in 1929 to resist zamindari attacks on tenants' occupancy rights.
• The All India Kisan Sabha was formed at the Lucknow session of the Congress in April 1936 with Sahajanand Saraswati as its first President; N. G. Ranga and E. M. S. Namboodiripad were among its prominent leaders.
• The Kisan Manifesto of August 1936 demanded abolition of the zamindari system and cancellation of rural debts; in October 1937 the All India Kisan Sabha adopted the red flag as its banner.
• The Bakasht movement of 1937–38 in Bihar — 'bakasht' means self-cultivated — resisted the eviction of tenants from bakasht lands by zamindars and led to the Bihar Tenancy Act and the Bakasht land tax; the Kisan Sabha was by then in open conflict with Congress ministries in Bihar and the United Provinces.
• Sahajanand's ashram was at Bihta near Patna, where he also led the struggle at the Dalmia sugar mill; on his arrest during Quit India, Subhas Chandra Bose and the Forward Bloc observed 28 April as All-India Swami Sahajanand Day, and he wrote Mera Jeewan Sangharsha, Kisan Sabha ke Sansmaran and Khet Mazdoor, the last from Hazaribagh Central Jail.

• Choosing Baba Ram Chandra or Acharya Narendra Dev because they are genuinely peasant-movement leaders — both belong to the United Provinces, and the stem says Bihar
• Choosing Raj Kumar Shukla because he is the Bihar peasant name every student knows — Champaran 1917 was a district indigo grievance, not the Kisan Sabha, which Sahajanand founded in Bihar only in 1929
• Eliminating Sahajanand Saraswati on the ground that he was born in Ghazipur in eastern UP — his entire organisational career was built in Bihar, with his ashram at Bihta near Patna

BPSC asks it as a single-name recall question with the province written into the stem, because the province is the whole test: it wants the candidate who can tell Bihar's peasant leader from UP's. UPSC prefers to embed the same man inside a matching set — pairing a movement or organisation with its leader, so that Sahajanand Saraswati sits next to Gandhi's Anti-Untouchability League and Periyar's Self-Respect movement — or to ask who was NOT among the founders of a named Kisan Sabha, which rewards knowing the founding lists rather than one name.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The All India Kisan Sabha was founded in April 1936 during the session of the Indian National Congress held at

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

  Answer(a) Lucknow — the All India Kisan Sabha was formed at the Lucknow session of the Congress in April 1936 with Swami Sahajanand Saraswati as its first President. Faizpur was the 1936 session that followed, Haripura 1938 and Tripuri 1939.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Bakasht movement of 1937-38 in Bihar was directed against

  • (a)the forced cultivation of indigo by tenants
  • (b)the eviction of tenants from bakasht (self-cultivated) lands by zamindars
  • (c)the imposition of the salt tax
  • (d)the recruitment of Indian soldiers for the Second World War

  Answer(b) the eviction of tenants from bakasht (self-cultivated) lands by zamindars — led by Swami Sahajanand Saraswati, it resulted in the Bihar Tenancy Act and the Bakasht land tax. Forced indigo cultivation was the Champaran grievance of 1917.