At which Viceroy was a bomb thrown on the occasion of his state entry into Delhi?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, Lord Hardinge. On 23 December 1912 Charles Hardinge, 1st Baron Hardinge of Penshurst, Viceroy from 1910 to 1916, made his ceremonial state entry into Delhi to mark the transfer of the capital of British India from Calcutta. He and Lady Hardinge rode an elephant at the head of the procession; as it moved through Chandni Chowk a home-made bomb packed with screws was thrown into the howdah by Basanta Kumar Biswas, a young revolutionary from a village in Nadia. The Viceroy was wounded in the back, shoulders, legs and head — the flesh of his shoulders torn in strips — but survived. Lady Hardinge, the elephant and its mahout were unhurt; the attendant standing behind the Viceroy holding his ceremonial parasol was killed, a man who had held the same umbrella for Lord Curzon. The plot is known to history as the Delhi Conspiracy, or the Delhi-Lahore Conspiracy. It was hatched by the Bengal and Punjab revolutionary underground affiliated to the Anushilan Samiti and was headed by Rash Behari Bose. Because the assassin was not identified on the spot, the Government announced a reward of Rs 10,000; Rash Behari Bose evaded capture for nearly three years, moved on into the Ghadar plan of 1915 and then escaped to Japan. The Delhi Conspiracy trial closed on 5 October 1914, when Lala Hanumant Sahai was sentenced to transportation for life to the Andaman Islands and four men — Basanta Kumar Biswas, Amir Chand, Avadh Behari and Bhai Balmukund — were sentenced to death; Biswas was hanged at Ambala Central Jail on 11 May 1915, aged twenty, one of the youngest revolutionaries ever executed in India. Note what actually fixes the answer. The stem does not merely say a bomb was thrown at a Viceroy — it says it happened at his state entry into Delhi, and only one Viceroy ever made such an entry, because Delhi became the capital during Hardinge's term and during nobody else's.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The reflex answer, because Curzon (Viceroy 1899-1905) is the Viceroy most associated with Delhi pageantry and with provoking Indian anger — he staged the Durbar of 1 January 1903 for Edward VII's accession and partitioned Bengal in 1905, the act that began the revolutionary decade. But no bomb was ever thrown at him. His only connection to this episode is grim and incidental: the parasol-bearer killed by the Delhi bomb had carried the umbrella for Curzon too.  (b) The best-informed wrong answer, because a bomb attack on a Viceroy did happen in his term: on 15 November 1909 two bombs were hurled at Lord and Lady Minto near the Raipur Gate at Ahmedabad, and neither was harmed. That was Ahmedabad, not Delhi, and Minto (1905-1910) had left India before the capital moved. His Indian record is the Simla Deputation of 1906 and the Morley-Minto reforms of 1909, not the new capital.  (d) Chronologically impossible. Wavell was Viceroy from October 1943 to March 1947 — the era of the Simla Conference of 1945, the Cabinet Mission of 1946, Direct Action Day and the interim government. That is three decades after the revolutionary bomb-throwing phase of 1908-1915, and by then Delhi had been the capital for a generation, so no state entry was in question.

Concept: Two separate stories cross at Chandni Chowk on 23 December 1912. The first is imperial. At the Delhi Durbar of 12 December 1911 King George V — the only reigning British monarch crowned in India — announced both the annulment of the 1905 partition of Bengal and the shifting of the capital from Calcutta to Delhi. Calcutta had been the seat of British power since 1772 but had also become the headquarters of Swadeshi agitation; Delhi offered Mughal-imperial symbolism and distance from Bengali politics, and the state entry of December 1912 was staged to complete the move. The second story is revolutionary. The partition of Bengal had produced a decade of secret societies — the Anushilan Samiti in Dacca and Calcutta, and Jugantar — whose chosen method was the assassination of individual officials: the Muzaffarpur bomb of 30 April 1908 thrown by Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki, the Alipore bomb case that followed, the Nasik conspiracy of 1909. Rash Behari Bose carried that method out of Bengal into Punjab and the United Provinces and aimed it, in 1912, at the Viceroy in person and at the very ceremony meant to display imperial permanence. He then linked the same network to the Ghadar plan for an army mutiny in February 1915, and when that failed escaped to Japan, where he founded the Indian Independence League and in 1943 handed leadership of the Indian National Army to Subhas Chandra Bose.

State PCS 2025 Q72 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q72 — History PYQ with Answer