MPSC 2024 Prelims Paper-I · Question 1 of 100

Correct — option (3), Lala Lajpatrai. The name of the institution is the trap: the 'Tilak School of Politics' was not founded by Tilak, nor in Maharashtra. It was set up at Lahore by Lala Lajpat Rai as a memorial to Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who died on 1 August 1920, and it opened in the months immediately after that death (sources place it in 1920–21). Lajpat Rai and Tilak were two-thirds of the 'Lal-Bal-Pal' trio that had led the Extremist wing of the Congress from the Swadeshi years, so the memorial was a political statement as much as an educational one — the militant nationalist who had survived was institutionalising the teaching of the one who had not. The school was deliberately built outside the university system, which in Punjab meant outside a government-controlled and government-affiliating structure: it taught politics, economics, sociology, journalism and social work to young men who were expected to become full-time public workers rather than degree-holders. That purpose — training what Lajpat Rai called 'national missionaries' — is the thread connecting it to his better-known foundation of the following year, the Servants of the People Society (Lok Sevak Mandal), set up at Lahore in 1921, into which the school's work was folded. Lajpat Rai's institution-building record makes him the plausible founder on general grounds too: he had already been associated with the founding of the Punjab National Bank in 1894, he presided over the special Calcutta session of the Congress in September 1920 that adopted Non-Cooperation, and the National College at Lahore — where Bhagat Singh later studied — grew out of the same non-cooperation impulse to build Indian institutions parallel to official ones. The question tests whether a candidate reads the word 'Tilak' as a dedication rather than as an authorship clue.

• (1)Bipinchandra Pal — Bipin Chandra Pal is the 'Pal' of Lal-Bal-Pal, which makes him the most tempting wrong answer here — if the school honours Tilak, a candidate reasons, one of Tilak's two comrades must have built it, and Pal is as good a candidate as Lajpat Rai. But Pal's life's work ran through journalism and oratory rather than institution-building: he edited and wrote for papers such as Bande Mataram and New India, toured relentlessly during the Swadeshi and Boycott agitation, and is remembered for propagating extremist nationalism in print and on the platform. No school of politics is recorded to him, and by the early 1920s he had also drifted away from the Gandhian Congress mainstream in which the Tilak memorial institutions were being raised.
• (2)Shripad Amrut Dange — S. A. Dange is bait for candidates who reach for a Maharashtra name the moment they see 'Tilak'. He was indeed a Maharashtrian who began in the Tilakite milieu — his 1921 pamphlet Gandhi vs Lenin argued the case for a Marxist rather than Gandhian path — but he then became one of the founding figures of Indian communism and of its trade-union work, and was prosecuted in the Kanpur Bolshevik Conspiracy Case of 1924 and the Meerut Conspiracy Case that opened in 1929. His institutional legacy lies in the Communist Party and in the labour unions of Bombay's mill districts, not in an academy of politics at Lahore, and he was far too junior in 1920 to be founding memorial institutions to Tilak.
• (4)Arvind Ghosh — Aurobindo Ghose belongs to the Extremist generation and edited Bande Mataram, but he is ruled out by chronology rather than by ideology. He was tried in the Alipore Bomb Case of 1908–09, and in 1910 he withdrew from politics altogether to Pondicherry, where he spent the rest of his life on spiritual work and never returned to organised nationalist activity. By 1920, when Tilak died and the memorial school was founded at Lahore, Aurobindo had been out of the political field for a decade, so he could not have founded an institution created to carry Tilak's political method forward.

The years around 1920 produced a wave of Indian-run educational institutions built deliberately outside the colonial university system. Non-Cooperation asked students to leave government and government-aided colleges, which created an immediate need for places they could go instead: the Kashi Vidyapith, the Gujarat Vidyapith, the Bihar Vidyapith, Jamia Millia Islamia and the National College at Lahore all belong to this moment. The Tilak School of Politics sits inside that family but with a narrower aim — it was not a general national university but a training institute for full-time political and social workers, teaching politics, economics, sociology, journalism and social work to men who would go out as organisers rather than graduates. Lala Lajpat Rai's founding of it, and then of the Servants of the People Society at Lahore in 1921, shows the same idea twice: nationalism needed a cadre that was trained, paid a subsistence allowance and permanently available, not merely enthusiastic.

MPSC's modern-history section is fond of questions in which the name of an institution points at one person while its founder is another — 'Tilak School of Politics' founded by Lajpat Rai is the archetype, as are the several institutions named for people who did not create them. The habit the question rewards is to read a proper noun in a title as a dedication until proved otherwise, and to keep a mental list of who actually founded what. It is worth noticing that this paper's very next examinable layer is the Punjab-Maharashtra crossover: Lajpat Rai is a Punjab figure honouring a Maharashtra leader, which is exactly the kind of link a state commission likes because it defeats the assumption that a Maharashtra-flavoured question must have a Maharashtra answer. It is worth carrying the second half of Lajpat Rai's story into this answer, because MPSC examines it separately: the leader who built these Lahore institutions died in November 1928 of injuries received while leading the demonstration against the Simon Commission, which is the join between this question's subject matter and the constitutional-history chapter of the syllabus.

• The Tilak School of Politics was founded at Lahore by Lala Lajpat Rai as a memorial to Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who died on 1 August 1920; sources date the school to 1920–21.
• It taught politics, economics, sociology, journalism and social work outside any university affiliation, its purpose being to train full-time public workers rather than to award degrees.
• Lala Lajpat Rai founded the Servants of the People Society (Lok Sevak Mandal) at Lahore in 1921, and the Tilak School's work was absorbed into that body.
• Lala Lajpat Rai presided over the special session of the Indian National Congress at Calcutta in September 1920, the session at which the Non-Cooperation programme was adopted.
• Lajpat Rai, Tilak and Bipin Chandra Pal formed the 'Lal-Bal-Pal' trio of the Extremist wing; Lajpat Rai died on 17 November 1928 of injuries received while leading the anti-Simon Commission demonstration at Lahore.

• Reading a person's name in the title of an institution as its founder — the school honours Tilak, it was not founded by him or by his family
• Assuming a 'Tilak' question must have a Maharashtra answer; this institution was founded at Lahore by a Punjab leader
• Confusing the Tilak School of Politics with the Tilak Maharashtra Vidyapeeth at Pune, a separate institution of the same commemorative wave
• Picking Bipin Chandra Pal purely because he is the third member of Lal-Bal-Pal — being a comrade of Tilak is not evidence of founding this school

MPSC repeatedly asks 'who founded / who established' questions in which all four options are genuine nationalist leaders of overlapping decades, so nothing can be eliminated by ideology alone and the item is decided purely on precise attribution. The productive way to prepare is a two-column list of institution and founder, with the place and year attached, covering the Non-Cooperation-era national schools, the reform societies, the banks and insurance companies started by nationalist leaders, and the memorial institutions raised after 1920. Where the exam adds a second layer, it is usually chronology — an option can often be eliminated because the person had already left politics or was not yet active, as with Aurobindo Ghose here.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Servants of the People Society (Lok Sevak Mandal), founded at Lahore in 1921 to train full-time workers for national service, was established by which leader ?

  • (a)Lala Lajpat Rai
  • (b)Bipin Chandra Pal
  • (c)Madan Mohan Malaviya
  • (d)Gopal Krishna Gokhale

  Answer(a) Lala Lajpat Rai — he founded the Servants of the People Society at Lahore in 1921, a year after founding the Tilak School of Politics in the same city. The comparable earlier body, the Servants of India Society of 1905, was founded at Pune by Gopal Krishna Gokhale, and the two are easily confused because both trained salaried full-time public workers.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Lala Lajpat Rai presided over which session of the Indian National Congress, at which the Non-Cooperation programme was adopted ?

  • (a)The Nagpur session of December 1920
  • (b)The special Calcutta session of September 1920
  • (c)The Amritsar session of 1919
  • (d)The Lucknow session of 1916

  Answer(b) The special Calcutta session of September 1920 — Lala Lajpat Rai presided, and the session adopted the Non-Cooperation programme, which was then confirmed at the regular annual session at Nagpur in December 1920. The Amritsar session of 1919 was presided over by Motilal Nehru and the Lucknow session of 1916, famous for the Congress-League pact, by Ambica Charan Mazumdar.