Who was the prominent leader of Kisan Sabha movement in Bihar?

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Correct — B, Sahajanand Saraswati. Swami Sahajanand Saraswati (22 February 1889 – 26 June 1950) is not merely a leader of the Kisan Sabha in Bihar; the Bihar Kisan Sabha is his creation. He founded the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha in 1929 to organise tenants against zamindari encroachment on their occupancy rights, and it was that provincial body, more than any other, that made an organised peasant movement thinkable across India. When the strands came together at the Lucknow session of the Indian National Congress in April 1936 and the All India Kisan Sabha was formed — with N. G. Ranga and E. M. S. Namboodiripad among its leading figures — Sahajanand was elected its first President. The Kisan Manifesto of August 1936 demanded the abolition of zamindari and the cancellation of rural debt; in October 1937 the Kisan Sabha adopted the red flag as its banner. His most concentrated Bihar campaign was the Bakasht movement of 1937–38 — 'bakasht' meaning self-cultivated land — against the eviction of tenants from bakasht holdings by zamindars, and it forced legislative response in the shape of the Bihar Tenancy Act and the Bakasht land tax. Note what that means politically: the Kisan Sabha was pressing a Congress provincial ministry, and its leaders drifted steadily away from the Congress and into confrontation with the Congress governments of Bihar and the United Provinces. He also led the workers' struggle at the Dalmia sugar mill at Bihta, where peasant and worker organisation met, and Bihta near Patna is where his ashram stood and where most of his later work was done. The arrest that produced 'Swami Sahajanand Day' came in April 1940, not during Quit India: the Government of Bihar's own history records that on 19 April 1940 he was arrested over three speeches in Patna district which the Government held to contain advice prejudicial to the prosecution of the war, and 28 April was observed in protest. Placing it in 1942 is doubly wrong, since Bose had left India for Germany by then.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The right province and the wrong movement. Raj Kumar Shukla was a Champaran indigo cultivator, and his place in history is that his persistent invitation brought Mahatma Gandhi to the district in 1917 to investigate the tenants' grievances. That was an individual petition on a district tenancy abuse, settled by a Government enquiry and the Champaran Agrarian Act, 1918 — a full decade before the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha existed, and organisationally nothing like it. Shukla never built a peasant organisation.  (c) The best-informed wrong answer, and the one that catches good candidates. Acharya Narendra Deva (30 October 1889 – 19 February 1956) really was a peasant-movement leader and really did preside over the All-India Kisan Congress; he was also a founding theorist of the Congress Socialist Party from 1934, exactly the milieu Sahajanand worked in. But he was born at Sitapur, sat in the United Provinces legislative assembly, and his base was UP throughout — later Vice-Chancellor of Lucknow University (1947–51) and of Banaras Hindu University. Not Bihar.  (d) The right movement, the wrong province and the wrong decade. Baba Ram Chandra — born Shridhar Balwant, who spent years in Fiji as an indentured labourer before returning to India in 1916 and settling at Ayodhya — organised the peasants of Awadh into a united front against landlord exactions from 1920. That is the Oudh or Awadh Kisan Sabha of the Non-Cooperation years in the United Provinces, not the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha of 1929, and the two belong to different regions and different phases of agrarian politics.

Concept: The Kisan Sabha movement was the attempt to give India's tenants a permanent organisation of their own, distinct from the Congress, with demands of their own. Its grievances were structural rather than episodic: under the Permanent Settlement of 1793 in Bihar and Bengal the zamindar was recognised as proprietor, and although later tenancy legislation gave long-standing cultivators occupancy rights, landlords kept working around them through illegal cesses, rent enhancement and above all eviction. Provincial Kisan Sabhas grew up in that gap — the United Provinces Kisan Sabha of 1918, Baba Ram Chandra's Awadh organisation of 1920, and Swami Sahajanand Saraswati's Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha of 1929, which became the strongest of them. The all-India stage arrived with the All India Kisan Sabha at Lucknow in April 1936, whose Kisan Manifesto that August named the two demands the movement never gave up: abolish zamindari, cancel rural debt. From then on the Kisan Sabha's relationship with the Congress was uneasy. Once Congress ministries took office in 1937 the Sabha found itself agitating against a nationalist government, and its leadership moved leftwards, towards the Congress Socialists, the Communists and Bose's Forward Bloc. Zamindari abolition, when it came, was enacted by the States after independence — Bihar's own abolition legislation was among the first in the country.

State PCS 2025 Q83 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q83 — History PYQ with Answer