MPSC 2024 Prelims Paper-I · Question 15 of 100

Correct — option (2), '(a) - (iii), (b) - (iv), (c) - (ii), (d) - (i)'. The Swadeshi movement began as a Bengal agitation against the partition announced in 1905, but it did not stay in Bengal, and the standard accounts name a leader for each region into which it was carried. Working through the printed pairs: Mumbai, statement (a), goes with (iii) Lokmanya Tilak, who took the swadeshi and boycott programme into Bombay and Poona through the Kesari and the Maratha and through the Ganapati and Shivaji festivals he had already built into instruments of mass politics. Delhi, statement (b), goes with (iv) Syed Raza Haider — the name is usually written Syed Haider Raza in the histories, and this paper prints the two parts in the other order. Punjab, statement (c), goes with (ii) Lala Lajpat Rai, who carried the movement there together with Ajit Singh, an agitation that alarmed the government enough for both men to be deported to Mandalay in 1907. Madras, statement (d), goes with (i) Chidambaram Pillai, that is V. O. Chidambaram Pillai, who gave swadeshi its most concrete commercial expression by floating the Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company at Tuticorin in 1906 to run ships against the British-owned line, and who was jailed and broken for it. That set of four pairings is option (2) exactly. The useful anchor in this question is Mumbai and Tilak: three of the four printed options accept the Punjab pairing with Lala Lajpat Rai, so it discriminates nothing, and the item is actually decided by whether the candidate places Tilak in Bombay rather than in Delhi or Madras.

• (1)(a) - (iv), (b) - (iii), (c) - (ii), (d) - (i) — This option is right about Punjab and Madras but transposes the first two: it puts Syed Haider Raza in Mumbai and Tilak in Delhi. Tilak's base was Poona and Bombay, where his newspapers and his festivals gave the swadeshi and boycott programme a ready-made audience, and he had no organising role in Delhi; Syed Haider Raza is named for Delhi in the standard accounts. Because only one pair is moved, this is the near-miss option — the kind that catches a candidate who checks two pairings, finds them right, and stops.
• (3)(a) - (iv), (b) - (i), (c) - (ii), (d) - (iii) — Here only the Punjab pairing survives. Syed Haider Raza is moved from Delhi to Mumbai, Chidambaram Pillai is moved from Madras to Delhi, and Tilak is placed in Madras. The Chidambaram Pillai error is the most easily caught of the three: his whole enterprise was maritime and southern, centred on Tuticorin in the Madras presidency, where the Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company he launched in 1906 challenged the British shipping monopoly on the Colombo run — an activity that could not have been conducted from Delhi.
• (4)(a) - (i), (b) - (ii), (c) - (iv), (d) - (iii) — Every pair in this option is wrong. Chidambaram Pillai is put in Mumbai, Lala Lajpat Rai in Delhi, Syed Haider Raza in Punjab and Tilak in Madras. It is the option for a candidate guessing without any of the four anchors, and it is worth noticing what makes it detectable at a glance: it is the only option that does not pair Punjab with Lala Lajpat Rai, the one association almost every candidate holds securely, so even partial knowledge should remove it immediately.

The Swadeshi movement of 1905 is the first agitation in Indian politics with a national reach and a positive economic programme rather than only a set of demands. Its four elements were boycott of British goods, the promotion of Indian manufactures, national education outside government institutions, and passive resistance. Bengal supplied the trigger — Curzon's partition, announced in 1905 and given effect on 16 October, when the day was observed with mourning and the tying of rakhi as a symbol of unity — but the Extremist leadership deliberately spread the programme beyond it, and the regional leaderships that emerged are what this question tests. The movement's economic wing produced real enterprises, of which V. O. Chidambaram Pillai's Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company is the most famous, and its educational wing produced national schools and colleges. The partition was annulled in 1911, but the techniques developed in these years — boycott, picketing, mass festivals, national education — became the standard repertoire of the movement thereafter.

Match-the-columns is used sparingly in this paper and MPSC builds these items so that one or two pairings are widely known and the rest are not, which means the exam is really asking for the pairing that discriminates. The efficient technique is to fix the pairs you are certain of, strike out every option that contradicts them, and then decide between what is left on the one pairing you are least sure of — rather than trying to verify all four pairs in sequence. In this question the pairs to fix first are Punjab with Lajpat Rai and Madras with Chidambaram Pillai; what actually decides the answer is where Tilak is placed. The Swadeshi movement's regional leaders are also worth learning as a list in their own right, since the same names recur in questions about deportations, newspapers and the Surat split. The Swadeshi leaders are also the cast of the Surat split two years later, so these names have to be held with a second attribute — who remained with the Moderates and who went with the Extremists — because MPSC asks the same people in both contexts and expects the candidate to know them in each.

• The Swadeshi movement, launched against the partition of Bengal announced in 1905, rested on boycott of foreign goods, promotion of Indian manufactures, national education and passive resistance.
• Its spread outside Bengal is conventionally described by region and leader: Bombay and Poona under Tilak, Punjab under Lala Lajpat Rai with Ajit Singh, Delhi under Syed Haider Raza, and Madras under V. O. Chidambaram Pillai.
• V. O. Chidambaram Pillai founded the Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company at Tuticorin in 1906 to compete with British shipping, and was imprisoned after the agitation of 1908.
• Lala Lajpat Rai and Ajit Singh were deported to Mandalay in 1907 following the agrarian and swadeshi agitation in Punjab.
• The partition of Bengal took effect on 16 October 1905, observed as a day of mourning and of rakhi-tying, and was annulled in 1911.

• Trying to verify all four pairs when one pairing appears in three of the four options and therefore decides nothing
• Placing Tilak anywhere other than Bombay and Poona because his fame is national rather than regional
• Reading the two printed columns as already paired by their position on the page; the adjacency is layout, not an answer

MPSC uses match-the-columns for exactly the topics where a list of parallel items exists — regional leaders of a movement, rivers and their tributaries, institutions and their founders, national parks and their states. The construction is usually one option with a single transposed pair, one with two, and one with everything moved, so the marks are lost on the near-miss rather than on the wild option. The reliable method is to work from the pairings held with certainty, eliminate, and then judge only the residual pair; and for the Swadeshi movement in particular, learning the region-and-leader list as a unit answers this item in a few seconds.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company, launched in 1906 at Tuticorin to compete with British shipping, was founded by which leader ?

  • (a)V. O. Chidambaram Pillai
  • (b)Subramania Bharati
  • (c)Bipin Chandra Pal
  • (d)Ajit Singh

  Answer(a) V. O. Chidambaram Pillai — he floated the Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company at Tuticorin in 1906 as the most concrete commercial expression of the swadeshi programme, and was imprisoned after the agitation that followed in 1908. Subramania Bharati was the poet of the movement in the Tamil country, and Ajit Singh worked with Lala Lajpat Rai in Punjab.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Lala Lajpat Rai and Ajit Singh were deported to Mandalay in 1907 in connection with agitation in which province ?

  • (a)Bengal
  • (b)Punjab
  • (c)Madras
  • (d)Bombay

  Answer(b) Punjab — the two led the swadeshi and agrarian agitation in Punjab, and the government deported them to Mandalay in 1907. Tilak was sent to Mandalay the following year, but after a separate sedition trial in Bombay arising from his writings in the Kesari.