Which of the following statements is/are correct? 1. C. Rajagopalachari was the first recipient of the Bharat Ratna. 2. Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya initiated the concept of 'Integral Humanism'. Select the answer using the code given below :

Correct — B, 2 only. Statement 2 is the safe half of this item. Integral Humanism, or Ekatma Manavvad, is Deendayal Upadhyaya's doctrine; he set it out in a series of four lectures delivered at Bombay in April 1965, arguing that the individual should be understood as body, mind, intellect and soul together rather than through material welfare alone, and that a polity should be built on the culture it grows from rather than on an imported model. The Bharatiya Jana Sangh, of which he was then the leading organiser, adopted it as its official philosophy. Statement 1 is the half that needs care. The Bharat Ratna was instituted on 2 January 1954, and the first conferments, all made in that same year, went to three people together — C. Rajagopalachari, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and C. V. Raman. There was therefore no single first recipient. Rajagopalachari was among the first three, and had the statement said 'one of the first recipients' it would have been sound; as printed it claims a priority that none of the three separately holds, so the statement fails and only statement 2 survives. It is worth being straight about the softness of that reasoning: the item is decided by how strictly the phrase 'the first recipient' is taken, and a candidate who read it loosely and marked (c) had a real argument. What is not in doubt, and what is worth carrying away, is that 1954 produced three Bharat Ratnas at once.

• (a)1 only — The exact inverse. It certifies the claim about a single first recipient and throws out the attribution of Integral Humanism, which is not in dispute at all.
• (c)Both 1 and 2 — The reading available if 'the first recipient' is taken to mean 'one of the first recipients'. On the stricter reading it fails, because the honour was conferred on three people together in 1954 and no one of them can be called the first.
• (d)Neither 1 nor 2 — Discards statement 2, which is straightforwardly correct — Integral Humanism is Deendayal Upadhyaya's formulation, adopted by the Bharatiya Jana Sangh in 1965.

The Bharat Ratna is India's highest civilian honour, instituted on 2 January 1954 for exceptional service in any field of human endeavour. It carries no money; the recipient receives a sanad signed by the President and a medallion shaped like a peepal leaf and rimmed in platinum. Integral Humanism belongs to an unrelated corner of the syllabus — it is the political doctrine Deendayal Upadhyaya formulated in 1965 and the Bharatiya Jana Sangh adopted, and it is examined as a strand of modern Indian political thought alongside Gandhian, socialist and Ambedkarite ideas.

Two-statement items of this kind reward reading the wording rather than the topic, because one statement is usually secure and the other is a true fact bent slightly out of shape. Here statement 2 is clean, so the whole question is statement 1, and the operative word is the definite article. Three people received the Bharat Ratna in 1954 and the award has never been conferred on one person in a year by itself at its start, so 'the first recipient' cannot be satisfied by any of them individually. That said, the reading is not beyond argument, which is why this card carries a lower confidence than its neighbours — with no published key for this paper, the strict reading is the better-supported one but the looser reading is not absurd. Two adjacent traps are worth knowing: the Bharat Ratna and the Padma awards are not 'titles' prohibited by Article 18, as the Supreme Court held in Balaji Raghavan in 1996; and the honour has twice been suspended, in 1977 and again in the early 1990s, before being revived each time.

• The Bharat Ratna was instituted on 2 January 1954 and carries no monetary grant.
• Its first conferments, in 1954, went to three people together — C. Rajagopalachari, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and C. V. Raman.
• A recipient receives a sanad signed by the President and a peepal-leaf medallion rimmed in platinum.
• Deendayal Upadhyaya set out Integral Humanism, or Ekatma Manavvad, in lectures delivered in 1965; the Bharatiya Jana Sangh adopted it as its official doctrine.
• The Supreme Court held in Balaji Raghavan (1996) that the Bharat Ratna and the Padma awards are not titles within the meaning of Article 18.

• Naming any single person as the first recipient of the Bharat Ratna; three were honoured together in 1954.
• Treating the Bharat Ratna as a title barred by Article 18; the Supreme Court has held that it is not.
• Confusing Integral Humanism with Gandhian trusteeship or with Sarvodaya; they belong to different thinkers and different arguments.

As a two-statement item pairing an awards fact with a political-thought fact, as a who-received-it-first question, or as a statements item on whether the honour is a title under Article 18.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  How many persons were conferred the Bharat Ratna in 1954, the first year of the award?

  • (a)One
  • (b)Two
  • (c)Three
  • (d)Five

  Answer(c) Three — C. Rajagopalachari, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and C. V. Raman were honoured together in the award's first year.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The doctrine of 'Integral Humanism' is associated with which one of the following?

  • (a)Ram Manohar Lohia
  • (b)Deendayal Upadhyaya
  • (c)Jayaprakash Narayan
  • (d)M. N. Roy

  Answer(b) Deendayal Upadhyaya — set out in lectures in 1965 and adopted by the Bharatiya Jana Sangh. Lohia is associated with socialist thought, Jayaprakash Narayan with total revolution and M. N. Roy with radical humanism.