Match List I with List II
List-I List-II
Event/Organisation Related Person
a) Champaran Satyagrah 1) Jayaprakash Narayan
b) Azad Dasta 2) Shyam Narayan Singh
c) Individual S

Question

Match List I with List II
List-I    List-II
Event/Organisation    Related Person
a)    Champaran Satyagrah    1)    Jayaprakash Narayan
b)    Azad Dasta    2)    Shyam Narayan Singh
c)    Individual Satyagrah in Bihar 1940    3)    Sahajanand Saraswati
d)    Kisan Sabha Bihar    4)    Dr. Rajendra Prasad
Select the correct answer using the codes given below :
a    b    c    d

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — D, 4 1 2 3. Two of the four rows are settled beyond argument by the Government of Bihar's own official history, and between them they kill every other option. Row (a), Champaran Satyagraha, goes to 4, Dr. Rajendra Prasad: K. K. Datta's History of the Freedom Movement in Bihar, Vol. I, gives Chapter VI entirely to 'Mahatma's Mission in Champaran' and records that on the afternoon of 18 April 1917 Rajendra Prasad reached Motihari from Patna with Mazharul Haque, Braj Kishore Prasad, Anugraha Narain Sinha and Shambhusaran, to settle what the team would do once Gandhi was jailed. Rajendra Prasad's own account of the enquiry is quoted there: ryots 'came in large numbers to give their statements', and 'there was hardly a planter whose ryots had not come to us in their hundreds and had not acquainted us with the minutest details of their grievances'. Row (d), Kisan Sabha Bihar, goes to 3, Sahajanand Saraswati: Vol. II records the formal inauguration of a Kisan Sabha at Bihta Ashram in Patna district on 4 March 1928 by Swami Sahajanand Saraswati, who 'became the moving spirit behind the Kisan movement here'. Now look at what those two do to the codes. Only (a) and (d) begin with 4, so (b) and (c) are gone on the Champaran row alone. Option (a) then reads d–1, handing the Bihar Kisan Sabha to Jayaprakash Narayan, which the Kisan Sabha row forbids. Only (d) survives, and it happens to be right on the two remaining rows as well: Azad Dasta to 1, Jayaprakash Narayan, and the 1940 Individual Satyagraha in Bihar to 2, Shyam Narayan Singh. The Azad Dasta attribution is confirmed by the same official history, Vol. III: 'With the object of training bands of workers, Shri Jayprakash proceeded to Nepal with Shri Suraj Narayan Singh and Vijaya. Here he organised the Azad Dasta or guerilla bands for serving the whole country.' The Commission published no Remarks entry for this question, so the key stands as printed.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Gets Champaran right (a–4, Rajendra Prasad) and then collapses on the last row: it assigns d, Kisan Sabha Bihar, to 1, Jayaprakash Narayan. The Bihar Kisan Sabha belongs to Sahajanand Saraswati, who inaugurated it at Bihta Ashram in 1928 and led the peasant movement in Bihar until his death. JP's organisational home was the Congress Socialist Party, founded in 1934, not the Kisan Sabha. This is the trap option — it is right on one anchor and wrong on the other, so a candidate who checks only Champaran stops too early.  (b) Fails on the very first row: it pairs a, Champaran Satyagraha, with 2, Shyam Narayan Singh. Champaran is the most heavily documented episode in Bihar's freedom history and the Bihar Government's own account names Rajendra Prasad on the ground at Motihari from 18 April 1917. This option also sends the Kisan Sabha to Rajendra Prasad, compounding the error.  (c) Pairs a, Champaran Satyagraha, with 1, Jayaprakash Narayan — a chronological impossibility as an active association. The Champaran enquiry ran from April 1917, when JP was a schoolboy of about fourteen; he entered public life through the Congress Socialist Party in the 1930s. It also gives the Azad Dasta to Rajendra Prasad, who was a constitutionalist Congress leader and never led an underground guerrilla formation.

Concept: This row of the paper is really about the four distinct channels through which Bihar fought the British, each with its own leader and its own method. Champaran 1917 was a legal-investigative satyagraha: Gandhi and a team of Bihari lawyers recorded thousands of ryot statements against the tinkathia indigo system, and the state answered with the Champaran Agrarian Committee. The Bihar Kisan Sabha was a class organisation rather than a national one — Sahajanand Saraswati built it out of the grievances of tenants over rent, canal rates and eviction, and it eventually pulled against the Congress leadership as much as with it. Individual Satyagraha, from October 1940, was the opposite of a mass movement by design: Gandhi picked resisters one at a time so the campaign would stay symbolic while the war was on, and each satyagrahi had to notify the District Magistrate before offering resistance. The Azad Dasta belonged to the last and most radical channel — the underground of 1942, where socialists who rejected both petitioning and non-violence built guerrilla bands. Bihar contains all four, which is why BPSC can build a match-list question entirely out of one state's history.

State PCS 2025 Q100 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q100 — History PYQ with Answer