The Vernacular Press Act allowed

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — A, Confiscation of the printing press if the newspapers published anything that was found objectionable. Read the four options slowly before anything else, because the booklet set the negation in bold italics and that emphasis is invisible in plain text: option (c) is option (a) with the word 'not' inserted, and the insertion reverses the sentence into nonsense. Now the substance. The Vernacular Press Act, 1878 was proposed by Lord Lytton and passed unanimously by the Viceroy's Council on 14 March 1878, modelled on the Irish press laws, in the atmosphere created by the Second Anglo-Afghan War and by the criticism of the 1877 Delhi Durbar held while India was in famine. Its machinery worked in three steps. A district magistrate could require the printer and publisher of any vernacular newspaper to enter into a bond undertaking not to publish matter causing disaffection against the government or antipathy between persons of different religion, caste or race. The printer and publisher could also be required to deposit a security. And if a paper broke the undertaking, the security was forfeited — and, in the words of the standard account of the Act's provisions, 'if the violation happened again, their printing equipment could be confiscated'. Confiscation of the press itself, triggered by publishing objectionable matter, is exactly what option (a) states and exactly what the statute provided. The magistrate's decision was final, with no appeal to any court, which is why the Act was nicknamed the Gagging Act.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) Too wide, and wide in a way that matters. What the Act reached were the two things the publisher had put at risk: the security deposit, which was forfeited, and the printing press and printing materials, which could be seized on a repeat offence. It did not authorise a general attachment of a newspaper's assets — its cash, its premises, its subscriptions. The distinction between seizing the means of printing and seizing a business is the whole design of the statute.  (c) This is option (a) with a 'not' dropped into it, and it says the government could seize a press for publishing material that was found unobjectionable — the opposite of the Act's entire purpose, which was to suppress seditious writing in Indian-language papers. A negation planted inside a long option is the commonest way this paper builds a decoy, and the only defence is to read every option to the end.  (d) This needs at least two of the first three statements to be true at once. Option (c) is self-defeating and option (b) overstates the Act's reach beyond the press and the security deposit, so only one statement survives — and an escape option that requires two survivors cannot be taken when there is one.

Concept: The Vernacular Press Act belongs to a chain of colonial press controls that runs from the Censorship of Press Act, 1799 and Metcalfe's liberal Press Act of 1835 through the Licensing Act of 1857 to the Newspapers (Incitement to Offences) Act, 1908 and the Indian Press Act, 1910. What sets the 1878 Act apart is that it was openly discriminatory by language. It excluded English-language publications altogether and applied only to publications in Indian languages, on the reasoning that English-reading India was already loyal and the danger lay in papers the officials could not read. The consequence was farcical and revealing: the Amrita Bazar Patrika of Calcutta turned itself into an all-English weekly within a week of the Act's passage and escaped it entirely. Proceedings were instituted instead against Som Prakash, Bharat Mihir, Dacca Prakash and Samachar. Every organised Indian association denounced the measure, and the Indian Association — one of the bodies from which the Indian National Congress grew — was among its loudest critics. Lord Ripon's government reviewed it and repealed it, the Government of India's despatch of 28 February 1881 announcing that the Act would go.

State PCS 2025 Q57 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q57 — History PYQ with Answer