MPPSC 2025 Prelims Paper-I · Question 99 of 100

Correct — A, G.T. Fisher. The commission's key names Fisher as the British officer who ordered the firing at Charan Paduka in Chhatarpur district, in the Bundelkhand region of what is now Madhya Pradesh. Accounts of the episode place it on 14 January 1931, when a gathering connected with the national movement assembled at Charan Paduka on the bank of the Urmil river and was fired on; because of the scale of the killing at an unarmed assembly, the site is remembered in Bundelkhand as the region's Jallianwala Bagh.

• (b)Asburn — Not the officer recorded for Charan Paduka. The paper surrounds the correct name with other British-sounding names so that a candidate who has only heard of the incident cannot reason the answer out.
• (c)Major Gausan — A decoy military title-and-name of the kind that fits many colonial episodes, but it is not the name attached to the Charan Paduka firing in the commission's key.
• (d)Major Timnis — Another 'Major X' decoy. Note the pattern — three options carry a rank, one does not; the answer here is the plain-named one, Fisher.

Bundelkhand's freedom struggle ran through princely states and British-administered pockets where the usual instruments of colonial control — bans on assembly, on the national flag and on 'seditious' meetings — were enforced by armed police. Charan Paduka in Chhatarpur district is one of the places where that enforcement turned into mass firing on an unarmed gathering during the agitation years around 1930, the year the Civil Disobedience Movement began. Local memory of MP's freedom struggle is built around a handful of such sites, and MPPSC quarries them for one-fact questions.

Questions like this cannot be reasoned out — they are recall of a name attached to a place. The practical study method is to build a small table of Madhya Pradesh's firing incidents and martyrdom sites (place, district, year, officer, movement) and revise it as a unit, because the commission asks a different column of that table each year: in 2023 it asked the year of the Thona-Luhari firing in Niwari district, and in 2025 it asked the officer at Charan Paduka.

• Charan Paduka is in Chhatarpur district, in the Bundelkhand region of Madhya Pradesh, on the bank of the Urmil river
• The firing is dated to 14 January 1931 in accounts of the Bundelkhand freedom struggle
• The site is popularly described as 'Bundelkhand's Jallianwala Bagh' because unarmed people at a public gathering were fired on
• 1930 is the year the Civil Disobedience Movement opened nationally with the Dandi March (12 March – 6 April 1930)
• MPPSC has tested a parallel episode — the Thona-Luhari firing incident of Niwari district, which its 2023 key dates to 1939

• Mixing Charan Paduka (Chhatarpur, 1930) with the Thona-Luhari firing (Niwari, 1939)
• Confusing General Dyer, who ordered the Jallianwala Bagh firing, with Michael O'Dwyer, the Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab
• Assuming every MP episode belongs to 1942 — the Quit India year — when several fall in the 1930 Civil Disobedience phase

MPPSC asks the place, the year or the officer of a named MP firing incident; UPSC stays with the national frame — the movement, the commission of inquiry, or who ordered a famous firing.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The firing at Jallianwala Bagh on 13 April 1919 was ordered by:

  • (a)Brigadier-General R.E.H. Dyer
  • (b)Lord Chelmsford
  • (c)Sir Michael O'Dwyer
  • (d)General Neill

  Answer(a) Brigadier-General R.E.H. Dyer — Michael O'Dwyer was the Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab at the time, a different man.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Civil Disobedience Movement was launched in 1930 with:

  • (a)the Champaran satyagraha
  • (b)the Dandi salt march
  • (c)the Quit India resolution
  • (d)the Non-Cooperation resolution at Nagpur

  Answer(b) The Dandi salt march — Gandhi began the march on 12 March 1930 and broke the salt law on 6 April 1930.