Enforcement Officer / Accounts Officer (EO/AO) 2017 recruitment test. Transcribed from the Commission's own booklet (series A, GRS-A-TNS); answer as per the official UPSC final answer key. This question is in Part B. Answer last reviewed 24 August 2026.

Which one of the following is not a feature of the Non-Cooperation Movement?

(a)Economic boycott was intense and successful.
(b)The middle class participated in very large numbers in the movement.
(c)It was marked by uneven geographical spread and regional variations.
(d)Along with Non-Cooperation, other Gandhian social reform movements like the anti-liquor campaign achieved some success.

Answer

Why

Correct — B, (b) The middle class participated in very large numbers in the movement. The stem is a negative one and the word not is printed in bold italic on the page, so the task is to find the single statement that does not describe the Non-Cooperation Movement. Three of the four are standard descriptions of it. The odd one out is the claim about the middle class, and the reason is that the middle class is the one social group whose part in this movement historians consistently describe as limited and short-lived. The movement’s importance is that it was the first all-India mass struggle: it drew in peasants, workers, artisans, shopkeepers, traders and — a feature never repeated on the same scale — Muslims in very large numbers, so that the old official jibe that the Congress represented a microscopic minority could not be made again. Against that, the professional and salaried classes made a narrower contribution. A number of celebrated lawyers gave up their practices, and students left schools and colleges in the first flush, but the boycott of the law courts was markedly less successful than the boycott of educational institutions, and by the second half of 1921 students were drifting back to their colleges and lawyers and litigants back to the courts. A candidate should be honest about the tension here: the initial middle-class response was real and is often quoted with a large figure attached to it. What the option asserts, and what the standard account of the movement does not support, is that participation in very large numbers by the middle class was one of the movement’s features; its mass character came from below.

Why the others are wrong

(a)Economic boycott was intense and successful. — This is a feature, and the best documented of the four. The boycott of foreign cloth was the part of the programme that took hold everywhere: volunteers went house to house collecting foreign garments, made public bonfires of them, and picketed cloth shops, while traders undertook not to place fresh orders. The result shows in the trade figures — the value of imports of foreign cloth fell from about Rs. 102 crore in 1920-21 to about Rs. 57 crore in 1921-22, roughly a halving in a single year. Charkhas were popularised on a large scale and khadi became the uniform of the movement, which gave the boycott a positive programme rather than a purely negative one.
(c)It was marked by uneven geographical spread and regional variations. — This is a feature too. The movement reached almost every part of the country, but its intensity varied a great deal from province to province and even from district to district. Bengal led on the educational boycott, where a students’ strike spread across the province; Punjab came second, with Lala Lajpat Rai prominent despite his early doubts about that item of the programme; Bombay, the United Provinces, Bihar, Orissa and Assam were all active; Madras remained lukewarm. Unevenness of this kind is what one expects of a first mass mobilisation, and it is exactly what the accounts of 1921 describe.
(d)Along with Non-Cooperation, other Gandhian social reform movements like the anti-liquor campaign achieved some success. — This is a feature as well, and the phrasing of the option is careful: the anti-liquor campaign achieved some success. The picketing of toddy shops was not part of the original non-cooperation programme at all, but it acquired great popularity in many parts of the country once volunteers took it up, and it ran alongside the other Gandhian constructive items — spinning and khadi, national schools and colleges, panchayats for the settlement of disputes, and work against untouchability. Because the option claims only some success for these, it is not overstated, and there is nothing in it to reject.

Concept

Non-Cooperation, launched formally on 1 August 1920 and withdrawn after Chauri Chaura in February 1922, is best understood through the social groups it reached and the ones it did not. Its programme had a negative half — surrender of titles, boycott of legislatures, courts, schools and foreign cloth, and eventually non-payment of taxes — and a positive half, the constructive programme of khadi, national institutions, Hindu-Muslim unity and the removal of untouchability. Different groups took up different parts of it. Traders and consumers made the cloth boycott work; peasants in Avadh, Andhra and elsewhere attached their own agrarian grievances to it; Muslims came in through the Khilafat question in such numbers that at some places two-thirds of those arrested were Muslims; students and lawyers made a brief and much-publicised showing that faded within a year. Knowing which group did what is what allows a candidate to judge four statements of this kind, and it is also what makes sense of the movement’s outcome — it demonstrated the reach of the Congress among ordinary Indians without extracting any concession from the government.

This is the paper’s negative-ask item on a topic every candidate has read, and the difficulty is deliberately placed in the reading rather than in the recall. Three of the four statements will feel familiar because they are drawn nearly word for word from the standard descriptions of the movement; the fourth feels familiar too, which is the point. What separates candidates is the discipline of testing each option separately against what is actually known, instead of stopping at the first statement that sounds right. It is worth internalising that the emphasised not is not decoration: on this paper fourteen questions carry a negative ask, and each one inverts what a hurried reader thinks is being asked for.

Key facts

The Non-Cooperation Movement was launched formally on 1 August 1920 and withdrawn by the Bardoli resolution in February 1922 after the violence at Chauri Chaura.
The value of imports of foreign cloth fell from about Rs. 102 crore in 1920-21 to about Rs. 57 crore in 1921-22.
The educational boycott was strongest in Bengal, with Punjab second; Madras remained lukewarm, so the movement’s spread was distinctly uneven.
The boycott of law courts was less successful than the educational boycott, although leading lawyers such as C. R. Das, Motilal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel and C. Rajagopalachari gave up their practices.
By the second half of 1921 students were returning to schools and colleges and lawyers and litigants to the courts, which is one reason offered for the timing of the withdrawal.
The picketing of toddy shops was not part of the original programme but became very popular in many parts of the country.
Muslim participation gave the movement its mass character in many areas; at some places two-thirds of those arrested were Muslims.

Which groups actually carried the movement, and which claim the option overstates

(b) The middle class — the odd one out→The professional and salaried classes are the one group whose part is consistently described as limited and short-lived. Celebrated lawyers gave up their practices and students left colleges in the first flush, but the boycott of the law courts lagged well behind the educational boycott, and by the second half of 1921 students were drifting back and lawyers and litigants back to the courts.

Where the mass character came from→Peasants, workers, artisans, shopkeepers and traders — and, a feature never repeated on the same scale, Muslims in very large numbers through the Khilafat question, so that at some places two-thirds of those arrested were Muslims. It came from below, not from the middle.

(a) Economic boycott — a feature→The best documented of the four. Volunteers collected foreign garments house to house, made public bonfires of them and picketed cloth shops, and imports of foreign cloth fell from about Rs. 102 crore in 1920-21 to about Rs. 57 crore in 1921-22.

(c) Uneven spread — a feature→Bengal led on the educational boycott, where a students’ strike spread across the province; Punjab came second, with Lala Lajpat Rai prominent; Bombay, the United Provinces, Bihar, Orissa and Assam were all active; Madras remained lukewarm.

(d) The anti-liquor campaign — a feature→The picketing of toddy shops was not part of the original non-cooperation programme at all, but it acquired great popularity once volunteers took it up. The option claims only some success for it, so there is nothing overstated to reject.

The frame of the movement→Launched formally on 1 August 1920 and withdrawn by the Bardoli resolution in February 1922 after Chauri Chaura. Its negative half was the surrender of titles and the boycotts; its positive half was khadi, national institutions, Hindu-Muslim unity and work against untouchability.

Study next

The programme of Non-Cooperation: its negative items and the constructive programme, and the Nagpur session of December 1920The Khilafat movement and its fusion with Non-Cooperation, and what the two gained from each otherChauri Chaura, the Bardoli resolution and the long argument over whether the withdrawal was justifiedPeasant movements that ran alongside the movement — Avadh, the Eka movement, the Guntur no-tax campaign, MalabarCivil Disobedience from 1930 compared with Non-Cooperation: programme, social base and outcome

Common traps

Missing the emphasised not and picking the statement that is most obviously true of the movement.
Treating a widely quoted number of students or lawyers as proof of sustained participation. Both groups largely went back within the year.
Assuming that a movement described as a mass movement drew equally on all classes. Its novelty was the entry of peasants, workers and small traders.
Overlooking the qualifier inside an option. The anti-liquor statement claims only some success, and a claim that modest is hard to falsify.

Negative items on the national movement are put together from statements that all sound like textbook sentences, so elimination has to be done one option at a time rather than by feel. On EPFO papers the false statement is usually made false by a specific and checkable defect — a wrong number, a wrong social group, a wrong province, a wrong date — rather than by being obviously absurd. The corresponding preparation is to hold two or three concrete particulars for each major movement: the trade figure for the cloth boycott, the provinces that led and lagged, the group that came in unexpectedly, and the incident that ended it.

Related PYQs

EPFO_EOAO_2017_Q35Open & attempt →

Which one of the following is not a characteristic of the Mughal chronicles?

(a) They present a continuous chronological record of events.
(b) They were a repository of factual information about the Mughals.
(c) They allow us to understand how imperial ideologies were created and disseminated.
(d) They contain brief biographies of the authors of the chronicles.

Answer(d) They contain brief biographies of the authors of the chronicles.

The other negative item in this history block, on the Mughal chronicles; both are answered by testing each statement separately rather than by recognising the topic.

EPFO_EOAO_2017_Q28Open & attempt →

Which one of the following publications was started by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan in 1928?

(a) Pakhtun
(b) Khudai Khidmatgar
(c) Young India
(d) India Awakens

Answer(a) Pakhtun

Asks about the publication Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan started in 1928, whose Khudai Khidmatgar movement carried Gandhian non-violent method into the North-West Frontier a few years after Non-Cooperation.

Practice

practice — not a real PYQ
The value of imports of foreign cloth into India fell from about Rs. 102 crore to about Rs. 57 crore between which two years, during the Non-Cooperation Movement?
- (a)1918-19 and 1919-20
- (b)1920-21 and 1921-22
- (c)1922-23 and 1923-24
- (d)1930-31 and 1931-32
Answer(b) 1920-21 and 1921-22
practice — not a real PYQ
Which incident led Gandhiji to withdraw the Non-Cooperation Movement in February 1922?
- (a)The Jallianwala Bagh massacre
- (b)The Moplah rebellion in Malabar
- (c)The violence at Chauri Chaura
- (d)The arrest of the Ali brothers
Answer(c) The violence at Chauri Chaura