EPFO EO/AO 2023 General Ability Test · Question 24 of 120

Correct — D, (d) B.S. Moonje. Dr. Balkrishna Shivram Moonje, the Nagpur physician who became a leading figure of the Hindu Mahasabha, set up the Central Hindu Military Education Society and, under it, the Bhonsala Military School at Nashik in 1937. His purpose was to make formal military training available to Indian, and specifically Hindu, boys at a time when the officer corps of the Indian Army was only slowly being Indianised and access to military education was narrow. The school's name comes from the Bhonsale house of Nagpur, Moonje's own city, which ties the institution to Maratha military memory. The school has functioned continuously since and is the reason Moonje's name is attached to the militarisation strand of inter-war Hindu politics.

• (a)V.D. Savarkar — Vinayak Damodar Savarkar is the strongest distractor precisely because militarisation was one of his slogans and because he led the Hindu Mahasabha as its president from the late 1930s. But his own institutional footprints are elsewhere: Abhinav Bharat, the Free India Society in London, the social-reform and temple-entry work at Ratnagiri, and the book 'Hindutva' (1923). The Nashik school was Moonje's project through the Central Hindu Military Education Society, not Savarkar's.
• (b)M.R. Jayakar — Mukund Ramrao Jayakar was a Bombay lawyer and constitutionalist — a Swarajist and then a Responsive Cooperator, a delegate to the Round Table Conferences, a judge of the Federal Court, and later the first Vice-Chancellor of the University of Poona. His life's work was courts, councils and universities, not military schooling. He is in the option set because he is a Maharashtrian contemporary of Moonje, which is the whole design of this question.
• (c)N.C. Kelkar — Narsinha Chintaman Kelkar was Tilak's lieutenant and the editor of 'Kesari' and 'Mahratta' after him, and a leader of the Responsivist group in Maharashtra. He is a newspaper-and-party figure, and no military academy is associated with him. Like (b), he is here to test whether the candidate can tell four Maharashtrian public men of the same generation apart by what each actually founded.

Between the wars a strand of Indian opinion argued that political rights would follow military capacity, and that the exclusion of most Indians from military training was itself a form of subjection. The Bhonsala Military School is the most durable institutional expression of that argument. Moonje built it not as a school of politics but as a school of drill, discipline and preparation for the armed forces, and it is remembered as the point where the 'militarisation of Hindu youth' argument stopped being rhetoric and became a building with a syllabus.

EPFO EO/AO history questions frequently take the form 'who founded what', with an option set of four contemporaries from the same province. The examiner is testing attribution, not sympathy or judgement, and the answer is settled by one fact: which of these four men actually started an institution at Nashik.

• Bhonsala Military School, Nashik — started by Dr. B.S. Moonje in 1937.
• It was run under the Central Hindu Military Education Society, founded by Moonje in 1935.
• B.S. Moonje (1872–1948) was a physician from Nagpur, a follower of Tilak, and a leading Hindu Mahasabha figure.
• The school's name derives from the Bhonsale ruling house of Nagpur.
• V.D. Savarkar founded Abhinav Bharat and wrote 'Hindutva' (1923); he led the Hindu Mahasabha from the late 1930s but did not found the Nashik school.
• M.R. Jayakar — lawyer, Round Table Conference delegate, Federal Court judge, first Vice-Chancellor of the University of Poona.
• N.C. Kelkar — editor of 'Kesari' and 'Mahratta' after Tilak, and a leader of the Responsivists.

• Defaulting to the most famous name in the option set. Savarkar is better known than Moonje and is wrong here.
• Assuming an ideological association implies founding. Several of these men shared a politics; only one built the school.
• Confusing the Bhonsala Military School (Nashik, 1937, private) with the Indian Military Academy (Dehradun, 1932, official).
• Mixing up the Central Hindu Military Education Society with the Central Hindu College at Banaras, which belongs to Annie Besant and the BHU story.

Founder questions in this paper come as a bare 'who among the following started X', with four same-region contemporaries. The reliable preparation is a list of institution-to-founder pairs from the national movement, learned in both directions, since the paper also prints them as Match List items.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Central Hindu Military Education Society, under which the Bhonsala Military School was run, was founded by :

  • (a)N.C. Kelkar
  • (b)B.S. Moonje
  • (c)M.R. Jayakar
  • (d)V.D. Savarkar

  Answer(b) B.S. Moonje

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following pairs is correctly matched ?

  • (a)N.C. Kelkar — Abhinav Bharat
  • (b)M.R. Jayakar — Bhonsala Military School
  • (c)N.C. Kelkar — editor of 'Kesari'
  • (d)B.S. Moonje — author of 'Hindutva'

  Answer(c) N.C. Kelkar — editor of 'Kesari'