Which Commission accentuated the discontent in all the political groups and parties for not associating any Indian member in it?

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Correct — C, Simon Commission. Its formal name was the Indian Statutory Commission; it is remembered by its chairman, Sir John Simon. It had seven members drawn from the British Parliament — Simon himself, Clement Attlee, Viscount Burnham, Edward Cadogan, Vernon Hartshorn, George Lane-Fox and Lord Strathcona — and not one Indian among them. The Government of India Act 1919 had itself promised that a statutory commission would be appointed at the end of ten years to review how diarchy was working, so a commission was expected; what was not expected was its date or its composition. The Secretary of State for India, Lord Birkenhead, appointed it in November 1927, two years early, because he feared his Conservative government would lose office to Labour and did not want the review handed to Labour sympathisers. He kept Indians off it deliberately, on the calculation that Indian members would vote with the Labour MPs, and Viceroy Lord Irwin backed the exclusion. The reaction is precisely what the stem describes. At its Madras session in December 1927 the Congress resolved to boycott the Commission and challenged Birkenhead to produce a constitution Indians would accept — a challenge answered by the Nehru Report of 1928. A faction of the Muslim League under Jinnah boycotted as well, and Gandhi and Nehru both condemned it. The Commission landed at Bombay on 3 February 1928 to a strike and to black flags reading 'Simon Go Back'; in Patna the demonstration was led by Maghfoor Ahmad Ajazi. At Lahore on 30 October 1928 the police, under Superintendent James Scott, beat the protesters; Lala Lajpat Rai, who led them, was critically injured and died on 17 November 1928. Note honestly that the boycott was not universal — B. R. Ambedkar, Periyar E. V. Ramasamy and Chhotu Ram supported the Commission, and an All-India Committee for Cooperation with it was formed under C. Sankaran Nair. The stem's 'all the political groups and parties' is BPSC's shorthand for the mainstream nationalist parties, not literally every organisation in India.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The exact opposite case, which is what makes it a fair distractor for a candidate who only recognises the name. The Welby Commission — properly the Royal Commission on the Administration of the Expenditure of India, set up in 1895 under Lord Welby to examine how costs were shared between Britain and India — did have an Indian member: Dadabhai Naoroji sat on it, and G. K. Gokhale and Dinshaw Wacha gave evidence before it in 1897. A commission with a serving Indian member cannot be the one attacked for having none.  (b) A mission, not a commission, and its function was the reverse of an inquiry. Sir Stafford Cripps landed in Delhi on 22 March 1942 to negotiate with Indian leaders; his draft declaration of 29 March 1942 offered Dominion status after the war, a constituent assembly, and a right for any province to opt out. The talks collapsed in April 1942 over the content of that offer — the deferral to the post-war future and the opt-out clause — never over who had been sent to make it.  (d) The intelligent wrong answer, because it too was all-British: Lord Pethick-Lawrence, Sir Stafford Cripps and A. V. Alexander, three British Cabinet ministers who reached India on 24 March 1946. But it was a negotiating delegation sent to settle a transfer of power WITH the Indian parties, and both the Congress and the League sat down with it. The quarrel was over the plan of 16 May 1946 — the grouping of provinces into Sections A, B and C — not over its composition. Nobody boycotted the Cabinet Mission for excluding Indians.

Concept: The Raj wrote its own review clock into its statutes. The Government of India Act 1919, built on the Montagu-Chelmsford Report, introduced diarchy in the major provinces: subjects were split into a 'reserved' list (law and order, finance, land revenue, police) run by the British Governor through his executive council, and a 'transferred' list (education, health, local self-government) run by Indian ministers answerable to the provincial council. Because everyone expected diarchy to need repair, the Act provided that a statutory commission would examine its working after ten years. That single clause is the ancestor of the Simon Commission. The chain it started is the spine of late-colonial constitutional history: Simon Commission (1927-30) to the Nehru Report (1928) to the three Round Table Conferences in London (1930-32) to the White Paper and then the Government of India Act 1935, which abolished provincial diarchy, granted provincial autonomy, created a Federal Court and the Reserve Bank of India, separated Burma and Aden, and proposed an All-India Federation that never came into being. Underneath the whole sequence sits a distinction the options are built to test: a COMMISSION is an inquiry body that takes evidence and reports, so its composition is its legitimacy, while a MISSION is a negotiating delegation sent to reach an agreement, so its offer is what is judged. Two of the four options here are missions.

State PCS 2025 Q76 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q76 — History PYQ with Answer