MPSC 2023 Prelims Paper-I · Question 7 of 100

Correct — option (3), 'iii, iv, ii, i'. Date the four events and the sequence writes itself. Statement iii, the Nehru report, is the earliest: the All Parties Conference appointed a committee under Motilal Nehru to draft a constitution for India after Lord Birkenhead's challenge that Indians could not agree among themselves, and the report was submitted in August 1928, proposing dominion status, a declaration of fundamental rights and joint electorates with reservations. Statement iv, the Dharasana satyagraha, comes next: it belongs to May 1930, in the Civil Disobedience movement that followed the Dandi march, when volunteers led by Sarojini Naidu with Imam Sahib and Manilal Gandhi advanced in waves on the salt works at Dharasana in Gujarat after Gandhi's arrest, and were beaten down by police in an assault that the American correspondent Webb Miller reported to the world. Statement ii, the Poona pact, is 24 September 1932, concluded in Yerwada jail between Gandhi, then on a fast unto death, and Dr Ambedkar; it replaced the separate electorates that the Communal Award of August 1932 had given the Depressed Classes with a larger block of seats reserved for them inside joint electorates. Statement i, the White paper, is March 1933: after the Round Table Conferences the British government published its proposals for Indian constitutional reform, they were examined by a Joint Select Committee under Lord Linlithgow, and out of that process came the Government of India Act of 1935. So the order runs 1928, 1930, 1932, 1933 — iii, iv, ii, i — and only option (3) prints it. Note that the list moves through four distinct phases in five years: constitution-making by Indians, mass civil disobedience, a communal settlement forced by a fast, and constitution-making by Britain.

• (1)iv, ii, iii, i — This option opens with the Dharasana satyagraha and buries the Nehru report in third place, which reverses the two events that most clearly belong the other way round. The Nehru report was submitted in August 1928 and Dharasana took place in May 1930, and the causal link runs from the first towards the second: when the report's demand for dominion status went unanswered, Congress declared Purna Swaraj at Lahore in December 1929 and launched civil disobedience in 1930. Only the LAST position is right here. Against the correct order — Nehru report (August 1928), Dharasana (May 1930), Poona pact (September 1932), White paper (March 1933) — this option matches on the White paper alone: the Poona pact sits second when it belongs third, and the Nehru report sits third when it belongs first. Three of the four positions are displaced. What makes the option tempting is not that it is nearly right but that it ends correctly, and an ordering question is often checked from its last entry backwards.
• (2)iv, i, ii, iii — This option places the White paper second, immediately after Dharasana, and pushes the Nehru report to the very end. Both moves are wrong by several years. The White paper of March 1933 could not precede the Poona pact of September 1932, and the Nehru report of August 1928 cannot be the last of these four events by any reading. The likely cause of the error is treating 'White paper' as a generic term and attaching it to some earlier British statement rather than to the specific 1933 document that led through a Joint Select Committee to the Government of India Act of 1935. Constitutional documents need to be dated individually, because their names are all interchangeable-sounding.
• (4)ii, iii, iv, i — This option begins with the Poona pact, which is in fact the third of the four events, and it therefore gets every position except the last one wrong. It is the choice of a candidate who ranks these events by prominence rather than by date — the Poona pact is the most famous item on the list, so it drifts to the front. Chronology questions punish that instinct specifically. The safeguard is to write a year against each item before looking at the options at all: 1928, 1930, 1932, 1933 here, which fixes the sequence before any option can suggest one.

The five years from 1928 to 1933 carry the national movement from its own constitution-making to Britain's, and the four items in this list are the milestones of that passage. The Nehru report of August 1928 was the Indian answer to the taunt that Indians could not produce an agreed constitution; it asked for dominion status, listed fundamental rights, and rejected separate electorates in favour of joint electorates with reservations — a rejection that cost it Muslim League support and produced Jinnah's Fourteen Points. When dominion status was not conceded, the Lahore session of December 1929 adopted Purna Swaraj, and the Civil Disobedience movement opened with the Dandi march in March 1930; Dharasana in May 1930 is its most widely reported episode, because the beating of unresisting volunteers was cabled abroad by Webb Miller and did lasting damage to British claims about the character of their rule in India. The communal question then returned in a sharper form: the Communal Award of August 1932 offered the Depressed Classes separate electorates, Gandhi began a fast unto death against it in Yerwada jail, and the Poona pact of 24 September 1932 substituted reserved seats within joint electorates. The White paper of March 1933 gathered the government's own proposals, and after scrutiny by a Joint Select Committee they became the Government of India Act of 1935.

Chronological-ordering questions are a fixed feature of MPSC's modern-history section, and they reward one specific preparation: knowing years, not narratives. A candidate who can retell the Civil Disobedience movement in detail but cannot say whether Dharasana preceded or followed the Nehru report will lose the mark, while a candidate with a bare date-line will gain it. The technique that works under time pressure is to date each item in the margin first and only then read the options, because reading the options first invites the mind to test each printed sequence for plausibility, which is slow and suggestible. A second technique is partial elimination: fixing only the first item of the sequence usually removes half the options, and fixing the last removes most of the rest. Here, knowing that the Nehru report is the earliest of the four eliminates three options outright. It is also worth noticing that MPSC prints its ordering options as bare Roman-numeral strings, so a moment's care is needed to read them accurately off the page.

• The Nehru report was submitted in August 1928 by a committee of the All Parties Conference under Motilal Nehru, and asked for dominion status, fundamental rights and joint electorates with reservations.
• The Dharasana satyagraha took place in May 1930, when volunteers led by Sarojini Naidu with Imam Sahib and Manilal Gandhi advanced on the salt works after Gandhi's arrest; Webb Miller's despatch carried the account abroad.
• The Poona pact was signed on 24 September 1932 in Yerwada jail between Gandhi and Dr Ambedkar, replacing the separate electorates of the Communal Award with reserved seats inside joint electorates.
• The White paper on Indian constitutional reform was published in March 1933 after the Round Table Conferences, examined by a Joint Select Committee under Lord Linlithgow, and issued finally as the Government of India Act of 1935.
• The chronological order of the four printed events is therefore 1928, 1930, 1932 and 1933 — the Nehru report, Dharasana, the Poona pact and the White paper.

• Ranking events by fame rather than by date, which pulls the Poona pact towards the front of any list it appears in
• Treating 'White paper' as a generic label instead of the specific March 1933 document that led to the Government of India Act of 1935
• Reversing the Nehru report and Dharasana, when the first belongs to 1928 and the second to May 1930
• Reading the options before dating the items, which invites the mind to test printed sequences for plausibility instead of constructing the true one

MPSC sets at least one chronological-ordering item in most modern-history sections, and it usually draws the four events from a single decade so that they cannot be separated by era alone. The Commission's favourite decade for this is the 1928-1935 stretch, because it is crowded with named documents, pacts, movements and conferences whose titles give no clue to their dates. The safest preparation is a compact year-line for that period, with one line per event, and a habit of writing the years down before choosing. The same events are also asked in other formats — who chaired a committee, what a pact substituted for what, which act followed which document — so the year-line repays itself several times over. Note too that ordering options in this paper are printed as bare numeral strings without commas in some questions, so the sequence must be read carefully off the page.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Poona pact of September 1932 replaced the separate electorates granted to the Depressed Classes by which of the following ?

  • (a)The Nehru report
  • (b)The Communal Award
  • (c)The White paper of 1933
  • (d)The Government of India Act, 1935

  Answer(b) The Communal Award — announced in August 1932, it offered separate electorates to the Depressed Classes, and Gandhi's fast unto death in Yerwada jail was directed against that provision. The Poona pact of 24 September 1932 substituted a larger number of seats reserved for them within joint electorates. The White paper belongs to March 1933 and the Act to 1935, both after the pact.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Dharasana satyagraha of May 1930, reported abroad by the correspondent Webb Miller, was led after Gandhi's arrest chiefly by whom ?

  • (a)Sarojini Naidu
  • (b)Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay
  • (c)Vallabhbhai Patel
  • (d)Abbas Tyabji

  Answer(a) Sarojini Naidu — she led the volunteers on the Dharasana salt works with Imam Sahib and Manilal Gandhi after Gandhi was arrested in May 1930, and the beating of the unresisting marchers was cabled abroad by Webb Miller. The episode belongs to the Civil Disobedience movement that followed the Dandi march of March 1930.