MPSC 2026 Prelims Paper-I · Question 9 of 100

Correct — option (1), Sadashiv Malkapurkar. He belonged to the circle of revolutionaries that gathered around Chandrashekhar Azad in the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, and specifically to the Jhansi group, a set of young men of Maharashtrian descent settled in the Bundelkhand region who became Azad's closest shelter and support in the years after the Kakori case. Malkapurkar was arrested in 1929 and prosecuted in the case that is remembered by the name of the town where it centred — Bhusawal, the great railway junction of Jalgaon district in Khandesh — and he served a long term of imprisonment for it. He is remembered in Maharashtra for one further reason: of all the men in the movement, he was among the very few Azad ever brought into his own family's confidence, and after his release he looked after Azad's mother. That personal detail is why his name survives in Marathi accounts of the revolutionary movement even though the Bhusawal case itself is far less documented than Kakori, Lahore or Meerut. This is a single-fact recall question with no internal structure to reason from — there are no statements to test, no combination to narrow, and the three other names are not absurd. That has a direct consequence in the hall. With a quarter of the marks deducted for a wrong answer, a question of this shape is worth attempting only if you can positively identify the right name, not if you can merely make the others feel less likely. Guessing between four Maharashtrian names of the revolutionary period, all of which sound plausible in the same decade, has a negative expected value; recognising Malkapurkar as one of Azad's Jhansi companions is what earns the two marks.

• (2)Vishwanath Vaishampayan — The strongest distractor by far, and the one that separates a candidate who has read about the Azad circle from one who has memorised a single name. Vishwanath Vaishampayan was a real and important member of the same Jhansi group — he was among Azad's closest associates and later wrote about him at length — so the name carries exactly the right associations for this question. But the Bhusawal case is attached in the record to Malkapurkar, not to him. This card deliberately does not assign Vaishampayan to a different case in order to make the contrast tidier: the trap here is precisely that a plausible association feels like a remembered one, and inventing a substitute fact would repeat the error rather than correct it.
• (3)Bapusaheb Sahastrabuddhe — A name of the right region and the right period, placed here because it sounds like it belongs. This card does not attach any case or organisation to it, because no attribution could be verified, and an explanation that invented one would be worse than an explanation that admits the gap. What is worth taking away is the technique. When three of four names in a recall question are people you cannot place, the question is not asking you to eliminate them; it is asking whether you can positively identify the fourth. If you cannot, the item is a guess, and on a paper that deducts a quarter of the marks for a wrong answer a four-way guess loses money over a full paper.
• (4)Gajanan Potdar — As with option (3), this is a plausible-sounding Maharashtrian name of the revolutionary decades, and this card will not manufacture a biography for it. The general point is about how single-fact questions are built. A setter needs three names that a candidate cannot confidently rule out, and the easiest way to get them is to draw from the same regional and chronological pool as the answer — same language community, same decades, same kind of activity. That is why elimination almost never works on this question type, and why the preparation that pays is a short list of named cases with the names attached to each, rather than a long list of names with no cases attached.

The revolutionary movement of the 1920s and 1930s is examined through its conspiracy cases, because the cases are what generated records, names and dates. The main sequence runs from the Kakori case of 1925, arising out of the train robbery near Lucknow, through the reorganisation of the Hindustan Republican Association into the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association in 1928, the killing of Saunders at Lahore and the bomb thrown in the Central Legislative Assembly in April 1929, to the Lahore Conspiracy Case that ended in the executions of Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru in March 1931. Chandrashekhar Azad, who was never captured, held the network together through those years and died in a gunfight at Alfred Park in Allahabad in February 1931. Around that main line sit a number of smaller regional cases which produced arrests and long sentences without producing famous martyrdoms, and the Bhusawal bomb case belongs to that second category. Its Maharashtra connection is twofold: the town is a railway junction in Jalgaon district, and several of Azad's closest companions in the Jhansi group came from Maharashtrian families settled in Bundelkhand.

Two things are worth learning from a question of this shape. The first is what MPSC is signalling. A state commission will happily examine a case that no national textbook covers, provided it has a state connection — a place in Maharashtra, or a person from a Maharashtrian family — and this is exactly the kind of item that separates candidates who have read Marathi accounts of the freedom struggle from those who have prepared only from national-level material. The second is the mark arithmetic of a pure recall item. There is no structure here to exploit: no statements, no combinations, no internal contradiction, and three distractors drawn deliberately from the same regional and chronological pool as the answer, so elimination is unavailable. On a paper carrying two marks a question and deducting a quarter of that for an error, an item you cannot positively answer is one to leave. The discipline of walking past four or five such questions is what protects the marks earned on the sixty-odd questions where reasoning genuinely helps.

• Sadashiv Malkapurkar was a member of the group of revolutionaries around Chandrashekhar Azad at Jhansi, and was arrested in 1929 and prosecuted in the Bhusawal bomb case, serving a long term of imprisonment; after his release he cared for Azad's mother.
• Bhusawal, which gives the case its name, is a major railway junction town in Jalgaon district in the Khandesh region of Maharashtra — the state connection that makes the case examinable for MPSC and effectively invisible to a national-level syllabus.
• The Hindustan Republican Association was reorganised as the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association in 1928 at a meeting in Delhi's Feroz Shah Kotla, adding a socialist objective to the earlier programme of armed struggle for independence.
• The principal cases of the movement are Kakori in 1925, the Lahore Conspiracy Case that followed the killing of Saunders and the Assembly bomb of April 1929, and the Meerut Conspiracy Case of 1929, the last of which was aimed at communist and trade-union organisers rather than at the revolutionary groups.
• Chandrashekhar Azad was never taken alive; he died in a gunfight with the police at Alfred Park in Allahabad in February 1931, and the Jhansi circle to which Malkapurkar belonged had been among his principal shelters in the preceding years.

• Choosing a name because it belongs to the right circle: Vishwanath Vaishampayan was genuinely one of Azad's Jhansi companions, which is exactly why he is the distractor placed second on the list
• Attempting a pure recall item you cannot positively answer, on a paper that deducts a quarter of the marks for a wrong answer and offers no structure to eliminate from
• Assuming that a case named after a town means the events happened only there; conspiracy cases are named for the place of trial or of the principal incident, and the accused were usually arrested across several provinces
• Preparing the freedom struggle only from national-level material, when a state commission draws freely on regionally remembered cases and figures

MPSC regularly asks a bare who-was-arrested, who-founded or who-edited question about a person or an episode with a Maharashtra connection, and it does so without any statement structure to reason from — the whole question is a single fact. That is the state commission's characteristic way of rewarding candidates who have read Marathi sources on the freedom struggle rather than only standard national textbooks. UPSC almost never asks a question of this kind; its revolutionary-movement questions concern organisations, their programmes, and the relationship between the revolutionary and the constitutional wings of the movement, so a UPSC-only preparation leaves this class of MPSC item unanswerable. The practical response is not to memorise every regional case but to know which ones carry a Maharashtra name, and to accept that some of these questions will simply be left blank.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Hindustan Republican Association was reorganised as the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association in 1928 at a meeting held at which of the following places ?

  • (a)Feroz Shah Kotla, Delhi
  • (b)Alfred Park, Allahabad
  • (c)Anandmath, Kanpur
  • (d)Lahore Central Jail

  Answer(a) Feroz Shah Kotla, Delhi — where the members met in 1928 and added a socialist objective to the organisation's earlier programme of armed struggle. Alfred Park in Allahabad is where Chandrashekhar Azad died in a gunfight in February 1931, and Lahore Central Jail is associated with the Lahore Conspiracy Case and the executions of March 1931.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Bhusawal, which gives its name to a bomb case of the revolutionary period, is a railway junction town situated in which district of Maharashtra ?

  • (a)Nashik
  • (b)Jalgaon
  • (c)Dhule
  • (d)Buldhana

  Answer(b) Jalgaon — Bhusawal lies in Jalgaon district in the Khandesh region and is one of the largest railway junctions in Maharashtra, which is what put it on the map of the revolutionary movement and what makes the case examinable for a state commission. Nashik is associated with a separate and earlier conspiracy case of the Savarkar circle.