MPSC 2021 Prelims Paper-I · Question 4 of 100

Correct — option (2): only the second sentence stands. Manabendra Nath Roy founded the Radical Democratic Party in 1940, and that party is the one attached to his name in every standard account. It did not appear from nowhere: it grew out of the League of Radical Congressmen, which Roy had formed in 1939 inside the Congress, and it took its distinctive position from the war. Roy argued that fascism was the immediate danger to humanity and that Indians should therefore support the Allied war effort rather than obstruct it, a stand that put him directly against the Congress line of the Quit India years and left the party isolated in nationalist politics even though it gave him a hearing with the government and a foothold in wartime labour organisation. V. M. Tarkunde, later a High Court judge and a founder of the civil-liberties movement, was its general secretary from 1944 to 1948. The party was dissolved in 1948, and Roy converted it into the Radical Humanist movement — a philosophical rather than electoral project, built on the argument that both orthodox Marxism and parliamentary liberalism had failed the individual, and that politics should be rebuilt from below through decentralised people's committees rather than through parties competing for state power. The first sentence fails on its own terms. Roy was never the leader of any Liberal Party. His political life ran through the Jugantar revolutionaries of Bengal, then the Mexican Communist Party which he helped found, then the Communist International, where he was prominent enough to cross swords with Lenin over the colonial thesis at the second Congress and to be sent as the Comintern's emissary to China, then the Communist Party of India's Tashkent group, and only after his expulsion from the Comintern and his years in Indian prisons did he arrive at the Radical Democratic Party and radical humanism. There is no liberal-party phase anywhere in that sequence, so the pairing offered in the first sentence has no basis and both-sentences choices fall with it.

• (1)First sentence is correct. — This would require M. N. Roy to have led a Liberal Party, and he never did. The label is a genuine trap because a Liberal party did exist in Indian politics — the National Liberal Federation, formed in 1918 by the Moderates who walked out of the Congress after the Congress-League scheme and the Home Rule agitation, whose leaders were Surendranath Banerjea, Tej Bahadur Sapru and V. S. Srinivasa Sastri. Roy belongs to the opposite end of the political spectrum from those men, and his trajectory ran through revolutionary terrorism, international communism and finally radical humanism. Attaching him to a liberal formation confuses a philosophical vocabulary he used late in life with an organisation he never joined.
• (3)Both sentences are correct. — Both cannot stand, because the first is false. This choice is the standard trap of the two-sentence format: a candidate who firmly recognises the true half often reasons that the paper would not have printed a plainly wrong companion sentence and takes both. The discipline the format demands is to adjudicate each sentence independently and only then to look at the choices. Here the second sentence is well founded and the first has no basis, so a choice that requires both to be sound is unavailable. Notice also that the sentences are constructed to look symmetrical, differing only in the name of the party, which is what makes reflexive acceptance so tempting.
• (4)Both sentences are incorrect. — This fails because the second sentence is true: Roy did found and lead the Radical Democratic Party, established in 1940 and dissolved in 1948. The choice is aimed at the candidate who has heard that something about the Roy question is a trick and over-corrects into blanket rejection. It is worth naming that reflex, because it is a recurring source of lost marks on this format: having spotted one planted error, a candidate assumes the whole item is a trap and discards the sound sentence with the unsound one. Adjudicate sentence by sentence, and let the verdicts, not the suspicion, choose the option.

M. N. Roy's life is the clearest single illustration of how far an Indian revolutionary could travel ideologically in one lifetime. He began as Narendra Nath Bhattacharya in the Jugantar group in Bengal, went abroad during the First World War on the German arms mission that historians call the Hindu-German conspiracy, surfaced in Mexico where he helped found the Mexican Communist Party, and rose inside the Communist International to a position from which he argued with Lenin himself about whether communists in colonies should support bourgeois nationalist movements. He was later expelled from the Comintern, returned to India, was imprisoned, and emerged with his faith in organised communism gone. The League of Radical Congressmen of 1939, the Radical Democratic Party of 1940 and the Radical Humanist movement after 1948 are the three stages of that final phase. Radical humanism holds that the individual, not the class or the nation, is the unit of politics; that morality is rooted in rational human nature rather than in party discipline; and that a genuine democracy would be built from organised local committees rather than from parties.

The two-sentence format used here is one MPSC uses steadily, and it is a format rather than a topic: the same four choices, first only, second only, both, neither, can be attached to any subject in the syllabus. What the commission is testing is a reading discipline. Each sentence must be judged on its own before any choice is looked at, because the choices are built to reward a candidate who has done that and to punish one who lets a half-recognition settle the whole item. The subject matter here is equally characteristic. MPSC likes leaders whose party affiliation changed over a career, because a candidate who has memorised a single label per person cannot handle them: Roy with the Communists and then the Radical Democratic Party, Subhas Chandra Bose with the Congress and then the Forward Bloc, Ambedkar with the Independent Labour Party and then the Scheduled Castes Federation and then the Republican Party of India. Build the list as a timeline of affiliations, not as a single tag.

• M. N. Roy founded the Radical Democratic Party in 1940; it grew out of the League of Radical Congressmen which he had formed in 1939, and its distinctive stand was support for the Allied war effort against fascism.
• V. M. Tarkunde was general secretary of the Radical Democratic Party from 1944 to 1948; the party was dissolved in 1948 and gave place to the Radical Humanist movement.
• Roy's earlier affiliations were the Jugantar revolutionaries of Bengal, the Mexican Communist Party which he helped found, the Communist International, and the Tashkent group of the Communist Party of India; he was never associated with any Liberal Party.
• At the second Congress of the Communist International, Roy advanced supplementary theses that disagreed with Lenin over how far communists in colonies should support bourgeois-democratic national movements.
• The Indian liberal formation of the period was the National Liberal Federation, founded in 1918 by Moderates including Surendranath Banerjea, Tej Bahadur Sapru and V. S. Srinivasa Sastri — an entirely separate lineage from Roy's.

• Accepting both sentences because one of them is recognisably true; the format is built to reward independent adjudication of each sentence before the option set is read
• Rejecting both sentences because a trap has been spotted in one of them; over-correction costs as many marks on this format as credulity does
• Confusing radical humanism, a philosophy Roy arrived at after 1948, with membership of a liberal political party, which he never held
• Dating the Radical Democratic Party to Roy's communist years; it belongs to 1940, long after his expulsion from the Communist International

MPSC uses this two-sentence shell across the entire syllabus, so the format itself is worth practising independently of the content. On modern history it is usually loaded with a leader-and-organisation pairing, where one sentence carries the true affiliation and the other a plausible but false one drawn from the same era. The productive preparation is a table of leaders against the organisations they actually founded or led, with dates, so that a false pairing announces itself immediately. Roy in particular recurs because his career supplies so many pairings — Jugantar, the Mexican Communist Party, the Comintern, the Tashkent group, the League of Radical Congressmen, the Radical Democratic Party and the Radical Humanist movement — and because the word radical in three of those names invites exactly the kind of confusion the first sentence here is trading on.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Radical Democratic Party founded by M. N. Roy in 1940 was distinguished from the Congress mainstream chiefly by which position ?

  • (a)It demanded immediate Dominion Status instead of complete independence
  • (b)It supported the Allied war effort against fascism during the Second World War
  • (c)It advocated separate electorates for the depressed classes
  • (d)It opposed the entry of Indians into the provincial legislatures

  Answer(b) It supported the Allied war effort against fascism during the Second World War — Roy held that fascism was the immediate danger and that obstruction of the war effort served nobody, a stand that set his party directly against the Congress line of the Quit India years and left it isolated in nationalist politics while giving it wartime access to labour organisation.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which organisation, formed by M. N. Roy inside the Congress in 1939, was the immediate forerunner of his Radical Democratic Party ?

  • (a)The Congress Socialist Party
  • (b)The League of Radical Congressmen
  • (c)The All India Forward Bloc
  • (d)The Independent Labour Party

  Answer(b) The League of Radical Congressmen — founded by Roy in 1939, it was the body out of which the Radical Democratic Party evolved in 1940. The Congress Socialist Party of 1934 belongs to Jayaprakash Narayan and Acharya Narendra Deva, the Forward Bloc of 1939 to Subhas Chandra Bose, and the Independent Labour Party of 1936 to Dr Ambedkar.