MPSC 2023 Prelims Paper-I · Question 79 of 100

Correct — option (2). Read the stem twice, because it runs in the negative direction: it asks which pair is incorrect, and the word carries the whole item while being printed in the same ordinary weight as everything around it. Note too that this is not a match-the-columns question. The two lines printed above the options, 'National Party of India' and 'Year of establishment', are column headings that tell the reader what kind of pair each option contains; each numbered option is then already a complete pair of a party with a year, joined by a dash, and the task is only to judge each pair as printed. Taking them in turn against the record: the Communist Party of India (Marxist) was formed in 1964, following the split in the Communist Party of India, so option (1) holds; the Bahujan Samaj Party was founded on 14 April 1984 by Kanshi Ram, so option (3) holds; and the All India Trinamool Congress was founded on 1 January 1998 by Mamata Banerjee after breaking away from the Indian National Congress, so option (4) holds. Option (2) pairs the Communist Party of India with 1926, and that is the year that fails. The party was founded on 26 December 1925 at Kanpur, and it is that date the party itself observes as its foundation. A complication worth knowing rather than fearing is that a rival claim places the founding on 17 October 1920 at Tashkent, among Indian revolutionaries abroad, and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) reckons its own lineage from that date; the two dates are the subject of a long-standing difference between the parties. What matters for this question is that neither of the contending dates is 1926, so the pair as printed is wrong under either reckoning, and it is the incorrect pair the stem asks for. Option (2) is the answer. One point of context that does not affect the answer but is worth noticing: the heading calls all four parties national parties, and the Election Commission had in fact withdrawn national party recognition from the Communist Party of India and the All India Trinamool Congress by its order of 10 April 2023, some weeks before this paper was written on 4 June 2023 — a reminder that the recognition of a party is a status that changes, whereas its year of foundation does not.

• (1)Communist Party of India (Marxist) CPI-M – 1964 — This pair is correct, so it cannot be the answer to a question asking which pair is incorrect. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) came into existence in 1964, when the Communist Party of India split over questions of political line and of attitude to the Congress government, and the group that separated constituted itself as a distinct party in that year. The date is easy to hold because it is the reference point for the whole later history of the Indian communist movement, including the further split of 1969 from which the CPI(ML) emerged. A candidate may pause here because two parties with almost identical names appear in adjacent options and the years 1964 and 1926 are printed close together; the way through is to fix the sequence in the mind — the parent party first, the split in 1964 — and then to check which of the two printed years is attached to which party.
• (3)Bahujan Samaj Party (B.S.P.) – 1984 — This pair is correct and is not the answer. The Bahujan Samaj Party was founded on 14 April 1984 by Kanshi Ram, the date being Dr B. R. Ambedkar's birth anniversary, and it grew out of the organisations he had built earlier — an employees' federation formed in the 1970s and a subsequent agitational organisation — with the object of political organisation among the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, other backward classes and religious minorities. The year is among the easier ones in this list to verify from memory because the party's rise in Uttar Pradesh politics in the following decade is so well documented. In a negative question the correct pairs must simply be set aside once verified, and the temptation to linger over a party one knows less about than the others should be resisted.
• (4)All India Trinamool Congress (AITC) – 1998 — This pair is correct and is not the answer. The All India Trinamool Congress was founded on 1 January 1998 by Mamata Banerjee, who broke away from the Indian National Congress in West Bengal, and the party went on to end the long communist administration of that State in 2011. The abbreviation printed in the option, AITC, is the party's registered form with the Election Commission. This is the most recently founded of the four parties listed, which is itself a useful check: a candidate who orders the four by date — 1925 or 1926 for the parent communist party, 1964 for the split, 1984 for the Bahujan Samaj Party, 1998 for the Trinamool Congress — will find that three of the four sit comfortably in that sequence and that any doubt must therefore concentrate on the remaining one.

Recognition as a national party is granted by the Election Commission under the Election Symbols (Reservation and Allotment) Order, 1968, and it is a status earned by electoral performance rather than a permanent attribute of a party. A party qualifies if it secures at least six per cent of the valid votes polled in Lok Sabha or Assembly elections in four or more States and in addition wins at least four Lok Sabha seats; or if it wins at least two per cent of the seats in the Lok Sabha from not less than three different States; or if it is recognised as a State party in at least four States. The advantages of recognition are practical — a reserved symbol available across the country, free broadcasting time on the public broadcaster, a set number of star campaigners whose expenses are not charged to the candidates' accounts, and the right to be supplied with electoral rolls. Because the criteria are performance-based, the Commission reviews them periodically and status is both gained and lost: by its order of 10 April 2023, the Commission recognised the Aam Aadmi Party as a national party and withdrew that recognition from the All India Trinamool Congress, the Nationalist Congress Party and the Communist Party of India, leaving six national parties on the list at that point. The founding years of the major parties belong to a different order of fact altogether and do not change. The Communist Party of India dates its foundation to 26 December 1925 at Kanpur, though a rival reckoning from 17 October 1920 at Tashkent is maintained by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which itself came into being in the split of 1964. The Bahujan Samaj Party was founded in 1984 and the All India Trinamool Congress in 1998.

This is a negative question in a paper that carries seven of them, none of them marked out in bold, so the first discipline is simply to register the direction of the stem before reading a single option. The second is to see the format for what it is: because each option contains a dash, the item looks at a glance like a matching question, and a candidate may waste time hunting for a second column to pair against. The two lines above the options are headings, not a column to be matched, and each option is a pair already formed and only needing to be judged. The third and most useful lesson concerns the kind of error the Commission plants. It is rarely a wild one. Here three years are exactly right and the fourth is out by a single year, which is a construction designed to defeat approximate knowledge: a candidate who remembers 'the CPI was founded in the mid-1920s' cannot separate 1925 from 1926, while one who holds the actual year can. Political party foundation years, like the launch dates of schemes and the years of constitutional amendments, therefore repay being learnt exactly. Note finally that the categories a question uses may themselves have moved: two of the parties printed here under the heading 'National Party of India' had lost that recognition from the Election Commission in April 2023, some weeks before this paper was written, which does not affect the answer but is worth knowing when a question describes a party by its status rather than by its name.

• The Communist Party of India was founded on 26 December 1925 at Kanpur, the date the party itself observes; a rival reckoning from 17 October 1920 at Tashkent is maintained by the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Neither reckoning gives 1926.
• The Communist Party of India (Marxist) was formed in 1964 following the split in the Communist Party of India, and a further split in 1969 produced the CPI(ML).
• The Bahujan Samaj Party was founded on 14 April 1984 by Kanshi Ram, and the All India Trinamool Congress on 1 January 1998 by Mamata Banerjee after her break with the Indian National Congress.
• National party status is conferred by the Election Commission under the Election Symbols (Reservation and Allotment) Order, 1968 on the basis of electoral performance — six per cent of valid votes in four or more States together with four Lok Sabha seats, or two per cent of Lok Sabha seats from at least three States, or recognition as a State party in at least four States.
• Recognition is reviewed and can be lost: by its order of 10 April 2023 the Election Commission recognised the Aam Aadmi Party as a national party and withdrew national party recognition from the All India Trinamool Congress, the Nationalist Congress Party and the Communist Party of India.

• Missing the negation in the stem and hunting for a correct pair, which is how this format is most often failed since nothing in the printing marks the word 'incorrect'
• Reading a set of dash-joined options as a match-the-columns question and searching for a second column, when the lines above the options are headings and each option is a formed pair
• Holding a foundation year approximately, when the Commission's planted error is typically a shift of a single year that only exact knowledge can detect
• Confusing the Communist Party of India with the Communist Party of India (Marxist), whose years of 1925 and 1964 are printed in adjacent options
• Treating national party status as a permanent attribute, when it is granted on electoral performance and is periodically reviewed, gained and withdrawn

Political parties appear in MPSC papers as foundation-year questions, founder questions, symbol and recognition questions, and matching items joining parties to leaders or to years. The negative construction used here — find the incorrect pair — is the Commission's preferred form because it obliges the candidate to verify all four items rather than to recognise one, and it appears across subjects in this paper rather than only in polity. The wrong pair is normally built by shifting a year slightly rather than by inventing an absurd one, so preparation has to be exact; a table of the national parties with their year of foundation and founder, extended to the principal parties of Maharashtra, covers most of what can be asked. Recognition criteria form a companion family of questions that is asked in its own right, usually as a numerical item on the vote share or the number of seats or States required, and is worth preparing alongside.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Communist Party of India (Marxist) came into existence in which year, following a split in the Communist Party of India ?

  • (a)1925
  • (b)1951
  • (c)1964
  • (d)1969

  Answer(c) 1964 — the Communist Party of India split in that year over differences of political line and of attitude towards the Congress government, and the separating group constituted itself as the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The year 1925 belongs to the foundation of the parent Communist Party of India at Kanpur, and 1969 to the further split from which the CPI(ML) emerged, so the three dates together map the main divisions of the Indian communist movement.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Under the Election Symbols (Reservation and Allotment) Order, 1968, a party may be recognised as a national party if it is recognised as a State party in at least how many States ?

  • (a)Two States
  • (b)Three States
  • (c)Four States
  • (d)Six States

  Answer(c) Four States — this is one of three alternative routes to national party status, the others being six per cent of the valid votes polled in four or more States together with at least four Lok Sabha seats, and at least two per cent of the seats in the Lok Sabha won from not less than three different States. Because all three routes rest on electoral performance, recognition is periodically reviewed by the Election Commission and can be withdrawn as well as granted.