MPSC 2022 Prelims Paper-I · Question 67 of 100

Correct — option (4), None of the above. This is one of the five negative stems in this paper, and the printing helps rather than hides: the word not in the English block and नाही in the Marathi block are both set in bold italic, so the Commission has flagged the reversal instead of leaving the reader to catch it. Take the hint, and state the task before looking at the options — you are hunting for something that is NOT a Panchsheel principle. The Panchsheel, or the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, are these five: mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty; mutual non-aggression; mutual non-interference in each other's internal affairs; equality and mutual benefit; and peaceful coexistence. Now test the options against that list. Option (1), mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty, is the first principle, word for word. Option (2), mutual non-interference, is the third principle in its short form, the full form being mutual non-interference in each other's internal affairs. Option (3), peaceful coexistence, is the fifth principle and the one that gives the set its formal English name. All three named options are therefore genuine Panchsheel principles, none of them is the odd one out, and the only choice left that can be true is option (4). The two principles the question does not print are mutual non-aggression and equality and mutual benefit, and a candidate who had memorised the list as a set of five would notice at once that the paper has offered three of them and withheld two — which is a useful way of confirming the answer rather than merely arriving at it. On the history: the five principles were set out in the preamble to the agreement on trade and intercourse between the Tibet region of China and India concluded in April 1954, an agreement made to run for eight years. Zhou Enlai had first stated them publicly on 31 December 1953 while receiving the Indian delegation to the Tibetan trade talks, and Jawaharlal Nehru and Zhou Enlai emphasised them together in a joint statement issued at Delhi on 18 June 1954. The name itself is Sanskrit in origin, panch meaning five and sheel meaning conduct or virtue, and it is borrowed from Buddhist usage, where the panchsheel are five precepts of personal conduct; Nehru's adoption of the word for a code of relations between states was deliberate. Because every principle printed here is a real one, the answer is option (4).

• (1)Mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty — This is the first of the five Panchsheel principles, reproduced exactly — mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty — so it cannot be the principle the question says is absent from the list. It is also the principle that has attracted the most comment in the years since, because the boundary dispute that led to the war of 1962 turned on precisely the territorial integrity the two governments had undertaken to respect, and because the agreement in whose preamble the principles appear was made to run for eight years and was not renewed when it expired. That history is worth carrying, but it makes no difference to this question: the question asks what the Panchsheel principles are, not whether they were kept. A candidate reading a negative stem too quickly may reject this option on the ground that the principle was violated, which is to answer a question about history with an answer about diplomacy. The stem asks for a principle that is not on the list, and this one is at the top of it.
• (2)Mutual non-interference — Mutual non-interference is the third of the five principles, given here in its short form; stated in full it reads mutual non-interference in each other's internal affairs. The abbreviation is the small difficulty this option is built on, because a candidate who has learnt the principles as a set of full sentences may not recognise a three-word version of one of them and may conclude that it is a near-miss invented by the examiner. It is not. Non-interference in internal affairs is a settled term of international law and appears in the same words in the Charter of the United Nations and in the declarations of the Non-Aligned Movement, and its inclusion in the Panchsheel was the point on which India laid most weight in 1954. The general lesson is that an option shortened to its keyword is still the same item; test the substance rather than the wording, and reserve the judgment that an option is a fabrication for cases where the substance itself is wrong.
• (3)Peaceful coexistence — Peaceful coexistence is the fifth Panchsheel principle and the one that names the whole set, since the formal English title of the Panchsheel is the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. It cannot therefore be the item that is not a Panchsheel principle. The phrase had a particular meaning in the diplomacy of the 1950s: it asserted that states with opposed social and political systems could deal with one another without either converting or destroying the other, and it was the intellectual foundation on which India built its policy of non-alignment during the Cold War. That the very name of the doctrine appears among the options is a small gift to a candidate who is reading carefully, because it is the fastest confirmation available that all three named options belong to the list and that the remaining option must be the answer. The two principles the paper has not printed here are mutual non-aggression and equality and mutual benefit.

The Panchsheel, formally the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, are mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty, mutual non-aggression, mutual non-interference in each other's internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence. They were set out in the preamble to the agreement on trade and intercourse between the Tibet region of China and India concluded in April 1954, an agreement expressed to run for eight years; Zhou Enlai had first stated them publicly on 31 December 1953 while receiving the Indian delegation to the Tibetan trade talks, and Nehru and Zhou Enlai jointly emphasised them in a statement issued at Delhi on 18 June 1954. The word is Sanskrit — panch, five, and sheel, conduct or virtue — and is taken from Buddhist usage, where it denotes five precepts of personal conduct; transferring it to relations between states was Nehru's own choice of vocabulary and carried a deliberate moral charge. The principles belong to a wider pattern in Indian foreign policy of the period, whose other elements were opposition to colonialism and racialism, support for the United Nations, solidarity with newly independent states in Asia and Africa, and the refusal to join either of the Cold War blocs, a position that hardened into the Non-Aligned Movement. The history that followed is examined as often as the principles themselves: the boundary dispute with China worsened through the late 1950s, the agreement of 1954 lapsed at the end of its eight-year term, and the war of 1962 followed. India has continued to invoke the Panchsheel as a statement of the norms that should govern relations between states, which is why the principles remain live examination material rather than a historical curiosity.

MPSC sets India's foreign policy regularly, and the Panchsheel is the single most frequently asked item within it because the content is short, closed and unambiguous — five principles, one year, one agreement, two names. The Commission's preferred way of testing a closed list is the negative question used here: print three genuine members of the list and offer none of the above as the fourth choice, so that a candidate who has learnt the list answers in seconds while one who half-remembers it must guess. Notice the particular hazard of that construction. A candidate who reads the stem as though it were positive will look for the principle that IS a Panchsheel principle, find one at option (1), mark it and move on with complete confidence, having lost the mark and a quarter of another. This paper marks its negations in bold in both language blocks, which is genuinely helpful and is not something a candidate should rely on in other years, since many MPSC papers carry negations in ordinary type with nothing on the page to warn the reader. The habit that survives either way is to name the task in one word before reading the options — exception, false, absent — and then to test every option against that word. On negative questions the marks are lost far more often by candidates who knew all the facts and answered the opposite question than by candidates who did not know the facts.

• The five Panchsheel principles are mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty, mutual non-aggression, mutual non-interference in each other's internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence.
• They were set out in the preamble to the agreement on trade and intercourse between the Tibet region of China and India concluded in April 1954, which was expressed to run for eight years and was not renewed when it expired.
• Zhou Enlai first stated the principles publicly on 31 December 1953 while receiving the Indian delegation to the Tibetan trade talks, and Nehru and Zhou Enlai emphasised them jointly in a statement issued at Delhi on 18 June 1954.
• The name is Sanskrit — panch meaning five and sheel meaning conduct or virtue — and is borrowed from Buddhist usage, in which the panchsheel are five precepts of personal conduct.
• The formal English name of the doctrine is the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, which is why peaceful coexistence itself appears as one of the five and cannot be the odd one out.

• Answering a negative stem as though it were positive and marking the first genuine Panchsheel principle offered, which is the way this question is designed to be failed
• Rejecting a principle because it was later violated in practice; the question asks what the principles were, not whether they were observed
• Failing to recognise a principle stated in shortened form — mutual non-interference is the third principle, whose full wording is mutual non-interference in each other's internal affairs
• Assuming that because this paper prints its negations in bold, negations will always be marked; many MPSC papers carry them in ordinary type with nothing to warn the reader

India's foreign policy appears in MPSC papers in a handful of recurring forms: name the five Panchsheel principles or identify one that is not among them; name the year, the agreement or the leaders associated with them; place the Non-Aligned Movement's founding conferences; and identify a named doctrine or policy such as the Gujral Doctrine, Look East or Neighbourhood First. Because the Panchsheel is a closed list of five, it lends itself to both the positive form, which asks which of the following is a principle, and the negative form used here. The efficient preparation is to memorise the five in order and in their full wording, since an examiner may print either the full sentence or a two-word abbreviation, and to attach to them the three anchors most often asked separately — the agreement of April 1954, the eight-year term that lapsed before the 1962 war, and the Sanskrit derivation of the name. Anything further about India-China relations is better prepared as a timeline, because dates are the second most common thing asked in this part of the syllabus.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following is one of the five Panchsheel principles that is often omitted when the set is listed incompletely ?

  • (a)Mutual non-aggression
  • (b)Collective security through military alliances
  • (c)Freedom of navigation on the high seas
  • (d)Compulsory arbitration of boundary disputes

  Answer(a) Mutual non-aggression. The five principles are mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty, mutual non-aggression, mutual non-interference in each other's internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence. Mutual non-aggression and equality and mutual benefit are the two most often left out when the set is recited from memory. Collective security through military alliances is the opposite of the non-aligned position India took, and neither freedom of navigation nor compulsory arbitration appears in the Panchsheel.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In which document were the Panchsheel principles first formally set out ?

  • (a)The Simla Agreement between India and Pakistan
  • (b)The preamble to the 1954 agreement on trade and intercourse between the Tibet region of China and India
  • (c)The final communiqué of the Belgrade summit of the Non-Aligned Movement
  • (d)The Instrument of Accession of Jammu and Kashmir

  Answer(b) The preamble to the 1954 agreement on trade and intercourse between the Tibet region of China and India. The agreement was concluded in April 1954 and expressed to run for eight years; Zhou Enlai had stated the principles publicly on 31 December 1953 while receiving the Indian delegation to the Tibetan trade talks, and Nehru and Zhou Enlai emphasised them jointly in a statement issued at Delhi on 18 June 1954. The Simla Agreement of 1972 and the Instrument of Accession of 1947 concern entirely different matters.