Champaran Agrarian Committee was appointed in agreement between :

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Correct — A, Indian Government and Gandhiji. The enquiry committee was the settlement of a stand-off between the colonial administration and Gandhi personally, and the Commission's own remark on this question puts it in one sentence: Gandhi led the Champaran movement and represented the peasants in the Champaran Agrarian Committee, which examined their grievances. Follow the sequence and the answer is forced. Gandhi went to Champaran in 1917 on the invitation of a local cultivator, Raj Kumar Shukla, to investigate the indigo tenants' grievances. The district authorities served him with an order to leave; he refused to go and chose instead to face the penalty — the first act of civil disobedience he ever committed on Indian soil, and the moment the confrontation became a matter between the Government and one named man rather than between planters and tenants. The Government backed down, and out of that climb-down came a Government commission of inquiry with Gandhi seated on it as the cultivators' representative. That is the body the question calls the Champaran Agrarian Committee, and it was constituted by the provincial Government of Bihar and Orissa. Its work produced a negotiated settlement under which the planters had to refund the tenants 25 per cent of the money they had illegally exacted, and — far more important in the long run — the tinkathia obligation to plant indigo as a condition of tenancy was dismantled. The reform was then written into statute as the Champaran Agrarian Act, 1918, and within about a decade the planters had left the region altogether. None of the other three men, however central they were to the satyagraha itself, was the party the Government dealt with when it agreed to set up the committee.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) Raj Kumar Shukla is the man without whom none of it happens — a Champaran cultivator who pursued Gandhi with an invitation until Gandhi agreed to come and see the indigo tenants' condition for himself. That earns him a permanent place in the story, and it is why the option is placed first among the wrong three. But he was a peasant petitioner, not a negotiator: he had no standing to conclude an arrangement with the provincial Government, and the enquiry committee was constituted after Gandhi's confrontation with the administration, not before it.  (c) Rajendra Prasad (1884–1963) was one of the Bihar lawyers who left his practice to join Gandhi's Champaran investigation, alongside Brajkishore Prasad, Mazharul Haq, Anugrah Narayan Sinha, Ramnavmi Prasad, J. B. Kripalani and Mahadev Desai, and he went on to become President of the Constituent Assembly and the first President of India. He was Gandhi's colleague in the enquiry, not the Government's counterparty in setting it up — and note the recurring UPSC trap that it was Shukla, not Rajendra Prasad, who brought Gandhi to Champaran.  (d) Anugrah Narayan Sinha (18 June 1887 – 5 July 1957), 'Bihar Vibhuti', gave up a flourishing law practice in 1917 to join the Champaran satyagraha and later became Deputy Premier and Finance Minister of Bihar province in the ministry sworn in on 20 July 1937, and Bihar's first Deputy Chief Minister from 1946. In 1917, though, he was a young recruit to Gandhi's team of investigators, not a principal in an agreement with the Government of Bihar and Orissa.

Concept: Champaran was a tenancy problem before it was a national one. Under the leases that European planters held over land in the district, tenant farmers were bound to grow indigo on a fixed fraction of every holding as a condition of their tenancy — the tinkathia system, whose name records the 'three kathas' of obligation. The economics then turned against the planters: German chemists synthesised artificial dye, natural indigo collapsed in value, and rather than absorb the loss the planters released tenants from the obligation in exchange for higher rents or a lump-sum payment. The First World War cut off German dye, indigo became profitable again, and the planters revived the old compulsion on tenants who had already paid to escape it. That double squeeze — pay to get out, then be forced back in — is the specific grievance Gandhi walked into in 1917. What made Champaran historically decisive was not the tenancy law but the method: Gandhi conducted a mass recording of testimony, refused an order to leave the district, offered to take the punishment rather than obey, and then converted the Government's retreat into a formal enquiry on which he himself sat for the peasants. It was his first satyagraha in India and the first time an agrarian grievance was joined directly to the national movement.

State PCS 2025 Q82 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q82 — History PYQ with Answer