MPSC 2025 Prelims Paper-I · Question 4 of 100

Correct — option (1), the Cripps Proposal. Sir Stafford Cripps arrived in India in March 1942 carrying a British War Cabinet draft declaration: Dominion Status for India after the war, a constitution-making body to be elected once the war ended, and — critically — a clause letting any province, and any princely state, opt out of the new union altogether. The Congress Working Committee, meeting through late March and early April 1942, found the offer unacceptable on several counts at once: independence was deferred rather than granted, the princely states' rulers rather than their people would decide those states' future, the opt-out clause opened the door to partition, and above all there was no immediate transfer of real power, especially over defence, while the war was actually being fought. The Committee's considered rejection was drafted and handed to Cripps on 2 April, but it was withheld from publication while last efforts at negotiation continued; when those efforts failed, the resolution was released to the press on 11 April 1942, and that publication date is the one this question asks for. Gandhi's verdict on the whole offer — a 'post-dated cheque on a crashing bank' — became the phrase by which the episode is remembered.

• (2)Aligarh Scheme — The Aligarh Scheme is a real but different proposal from a different source and a different moment: published in August 1939 by Professor Syed Zafarul Hasan and Dr Muhammad Afzal Husain Qadri of Aligarh Muslim University, it argued for India's Muslims as a separate nation and proposed carving out independent Muslim-majority states, part of the same cluster of partition schemes that fed into the Muslim League's Lahore Resolution of March 1940. It came from a section of Muslim League-aligned opinion, not from the British government, and the Congress had no occasion to 'reject' it by a formal resolution in April 1942 — it simply is not the Cripps offer.
• (3)Curzon Plan — If this refers to Lord Curzon's most famous intervention, the 1905 Partition of Bengal, it belongs to an entirely different decade and an entirely different kind of decision — an administrative reorganisation of a province carried out by a sitting Viceroy, not a wartime constitutional offer negotiated with Congress by a Cabinet minister. There is a 37-year gap between Curzon's viceroyalty (which ended in 1905) and the Cripps Mission of 1942, and no Congress resolution of April 1942 was rejecting a Curzon-era measure.
• (4)Latifs Scheme — Like the Aligarh Scheme, this belongs to the family of rival communal-settlement and partition proposals put forward by individual Muslim leaders in 1939–40 in the run-up to the Lahore Resolution, rather than to the British government's wartime offer of March 1942. It is a proposal from within Indian political opinion, argued and debated among Indians, and not the document the Cripps Mission carried or the one the Working Committee's 11 April resolution addressed.

The Cripps Mission was Britain's attempt to secure Indian political cooperation for the war effort by offering constitutional change after the war rather than during it. Its central mechanism — Dominion Status deferred to a post-war constituent body, with any province or princely state free to stay out of the new union — was designed to satisfy competing claims (Congress's demand for self-government, the princely states' anxieties, and the Muslim League's demand for safeguards) without actually transferring power while the war was on. That structure is exactly what made it unacceptable to Congress, the Muslim League and almost every other Indian political current, each for its own reasons.

MPSC's April-1942 questions test the precision of a date and an event together, and the useful discipline is to separate the negotiation timeline (Cripps arrives, talks run through late March, the Working Committee drafts its resolution and hands it over on 2 April) from the publication timeline (the resolution is released to the press on 11 April, once talks have visibly failed). The other three options in this item are not decoys invented from nothing — each is a genuine historical scheme from Indian political history of the 1905–1940 period — so the discriminating fact is not 'was this scheme real' but 'was this the specific thing rejected by this specific resolution on this specific date'.

• The Cripps Mission arrived in India in March 1942, offering post-war Dominion Status, a post-war constitution-making body, and a clause letting provinces and princely states opt out of the new union.
• The Congress Working Committee drafted its rejection and handed it to Stafford Cripps on 2 April 1942, but withheld publication while negotiations continued.
• The rejection was released to the press on 11 April 1942, after talks broke down, chiefly over the absence of any immediate transfer of power, especially over defence.
• Gandhi described the Cripps offer as 'a post-dated cheque on a crashing bank.'
• The Cripps Mission's failure was followed within months by the Quit India Movement, launched by Congress in August 1942.

• Confusing the date the Working Committee drafted its rejection (2 April) with the date it was made public (11 April)
• Assuming any 'scheme' or 'plan' name from this general period must be the one referenced in a specific dated resolution
• Treating the Aligarh Scheme or similar Muslim League-aligned proposals as offers that Congress formally 'rejected' by resolution, rather than British government offers like Cripps's

MPSC likes to pin a specific historical episode to a specific date and then test whether the candidate can name the correct document among several real, but wrong, alternatives from the same broad decade of Indian constitutional history. The safeguard is keeping a short timeline — who proposed what, and to whom, and when — for each of the major 1930s–40s offers and schemes, since MPSC's distractors are almost always genuine historical items rather than invented names.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Cripps Mission's central proposal, which the Congress Working Committee ultimately rejected in April 1942, offered India:

  • (a)Immediate and complete independence
  • (b)Dominion Status after the war, with provinces and princely states free to opt out of the union
  • (c)A federal structure under the Government of India Act, 1935, with no change to defence powers
  • (d)Full transfer of defence and external affairs to an Indian-led interim government

  Answer(b) Dominion Status after the war, with provinces and princely states free to opt out of the union — this opt-out clause, combined with the absence of any immediate transfer of power, was the core reason Congress rejected the offer on 11 April 1942.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Aligarh Scheme of 1939, proposing independent Muslim-majority states, was put forward by:

  • (a)Syed Zafarul Hasan and Muhammad Afzal Husain Qadri
  • (b)Stafford Cripps
  • (c)Lord Curzon
  • (d)B. R. Ambedkar

  Answer(a) Syed Zafarul Hasan and Muhammad Afzal Husain Qadri — two Aligarh Muslim University academics who published the scheme in August 1939, ahead of the Muslim League's Lahore Resolution of 1940. Cripps's offer came three years later, from the British government.