BPSC 71st CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 84 of 150

Correct — D, None of the above. This is one of the answers the Commission revised after the objection window, and the revision is the whole lesson. The provisional key marked (a), Raghunath Singh of Gorakhari; candidates objected; and when BPSC published its final key on 31 October 2025 it moved the answer to (d) and gave its reason in a single sentence — the names given in the options are different from the true name, which the Commission states as Rang Nath Sharma alias Raghunath Sharma. Set that name beside the three printed options and the arithmetic of the revision becomes visible. Option (a) reproduces the alias's given name, Raghunath, and then attaches the wrong surname: Singh, where the Commission's record says Sharma. Option (c) keeps option (a)'s village and swaps the man entirely for one called Satyendra. Option (b) matches on nothing at all — neither Rang Nath nor Raghunath — and it substitutes a place-name the stem itself does not use. With no option carrying the correct name, the only defensible key is (d), and that is the key on which marks were finally settled. Two things follow for a student. First, the mark here went to candidates who treated the options as claims to be checked rather than as a menu with one right item; on this paper 'None of the above' is not decoration. Second, be careful how you carry this question into revision. Beyond the Commission's own remark we could not confirm this episode in an independently published source, so this card deliberately attaches no date, no village and no circumstances to it. What is safe to learn is the reason the answer is (d), and the very well documented 1942 background against which a killing of this kind sits — both of which follow below.

• (a)Raghunath Singh of Gorakhari — The near-miss, and the reason the question had to be revised at all. It carries the correct given name from the Commission's record — Raghunath — and then gets the surname wrong, printing Singh where the Commission states Sharma. Half a name is not a name, and the provisional key's mistake was to accept it. Note also that its village, Gorakhari, is reused in option (c): the paper-setter has built look-alikes around one root rather than offering three genuinely distinct candidates.
• (b)Ram Narain of Bikrampur — Fails on both halves. 'Ram Narain' shares nothing with Rang Nath Sharma alias Raghunath Sharma — neither the given name nor the surname — and the option relocates the man to 'Bikrampur', which is not the place the stem names. The stem places the killing within the area of Bikram police station, and Bikram is a town and community development block in the Paliganj sub-division of Patna district, Bihar.
• (c)Satyendra of Gorakhari — The pure decoy. It borrows the village printed in option (a) so the two read like variants of a single real report, but the personal name overlaps nothing in the name the Commission gives. A candidate who half-remembers that 'something happened at Gorakhari' can be pulled towards either (a) or (c) by the village alone — which is what the pairing is built to do, and precisely why the village is the least reliable element in the option to reason from.

The act this question describes — hoisting the national flag and being shot for it — was the signature act of August and September 1942, and police stations were where it most often happened. The All India Congress Committee adopted the Quit India resolution at Bombay on 8 August 1942, and Gandhi's speech at Gowalia Tank Maidan gave it the call to Do or Die. Almost the entire Congress leadership was arrested within hours and held for most of the war, so what followed was leaderless, local and largely spontaneous: in hundreds of places the target chosen was the nearest visible piece of the state — the thana, the post office, the railway station, the treasury — and the flag over it was the point. Two killings from those weeks are documented in detail and show the pattern exactly. Kanaklata Barua, aged seventeen, led an unarmed procession to hoist the national flag at the Gohpur police station in Assam on 20 September 1942 and was shot dead; Mukunda Kakoti, who picked up her fallen flag, was shot too. Matangini Hazra, seventy-one and known as Gandhi buri, led a batch of volunteers to capture the Tamluk police station in Midnapore on 29 September 1942 and was shot in front of it. Bihar was among the provinces where the upsurge went furthest, and Viceroy Linlithgow called the movement by far the most serious rebellion since 1857. A death at a Bihar thana in that season is entirely of a piece with what is recorded elsewhere — which is why the question is plausible even though its options are not.

You cannot reason your way to this answer from history; you reason your way to it from the options, and that is a skill worth naming. When a question turns on one person's exact name and the options are near-variants of one another — Raghunath Singh of Gorakhari against Satyendra of Gorakhari, the village held constant and the man changed — the paper is testing precision rather than recall of an event. The single discriminating fact here is a surname. The Commission's record gives Rang Nath Sharma, known also as Raghunath Sharma; option (a) prints Raghunath Singh. Everything else about option (a) invites you in, and that one word shuts the door. The wider lesson concerns 'None of the above' itself, and this paper settles the question every candidate asks about it. Across the 150 questions of this booklet, 'None of the above' or 'None of these' is offered eight times, and in the Commission's final key it is the correct answer four times — here, on question 85, and on two others. That is a strike rate no candidate can dismiss as decoration, and two of those four became 'None of the above' only when the final key was published. With a third of a mark deducted for every wrong answer, the discipline that pays is to verify the option you like rather than accept the one that looks closest: if the name in front of you is not the name you know, the option is wrong however familiar it feels.

• The Commission's final key, published on 31 October 2025 when it disposed of candidate objections, moved this answer from the provisional (a) to (d), stating that the names printed in the options differ from the true name, which it gives as Rang Nath Sharma alias Raghunath Sharma.
• Bikram is a town and community development block in the Paliganj sub-division of Patna district, Bihar; the Bikram assembly constituency lies within the Pataliputra Lok Sabha constituency.
• The Quit India resolution was adopted by the All India Congress Committee at Bombay on 8 August 1942 with Gandhi's call to Do or Die; the Congress leadership was arrested within hours, which is why the movement that followed was leaderless, local and spontaneous.
• Kanaklata Barua (22 December 1924 – 20 September 1942) was shot dead at seventeen while leading an unarmed procession to hoist the national flag at the Gohpur police station in Assam; Mukunda Kakoti, who took up her fallen flag, was shot as well.
• Matangini Hazra (19 October 1870 – 29 September 1942), called Gandhi buri, was shot dead in front of the Tamluk police station in Midnapore while leading a batch of volunteers to capture it, becoming the first Quit India martyr of Midnapore; Viceroy Linlithgow described the movement as by far the most serious rebellion since 1857.

• Choosing (a) because 'Raghunath' looks right — the Commission's revision turned precisely on the surname, Sharma and not Singh
• Reasoning from the village instead of the name — 'Gorakhari' appears in two different options, so it cannot discriminate between them
• Assuming 'None of the above' is never the answer — on this paper it is offered eight times and is the key four times, including here and on the very next question

BPSC works at village-and-thana resolution: it takes a local martyrdom, prints three near-identical name-and-place pairs, and expects a precision that only Bihar-specific reading supplies — and when the printed names turn out not to match the record, it repairs the item through its objection window rather than deleting it. UPSC never asks who died where. It tests 1942 as a movement — what triggered it, what Gandhi said on 8 August, how the Viceroy described it, who kept it going once the leaders were in jail — so the same period is reached through significance rather than through a name.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Kanaklata Barua, shot dead in September 1942 while leading a procession to hoist the national flag at a police station, belonged to which province ?

  • (a)Assam
  • (b)Bihar
  • (c)Bengal
  • (d)Odisha

  Answer(a) Assam — she was killed at the Gohpur police station on 20 September 1942, aged seventeen, and Mukunda Kakoti, who picked up her fallen flag, was shot too.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Matangini Hazra, known as 'Gandhi buri', was shot dead in 1942 in front of which police station ?

  • (a)Gohpur
  • (b)Tamluk
  • (c)Chauri Chaura
  • (d)Barrackpore

  Answer(b) Tamluk — she was killed on 29 September 1942 while leading volunteers to capture the Tamluk police station in Midnapore, becoming the first Quit India martyr of the district. Gohpur is where Kanaklata Barua was killed.