Who was murdered while hoisting the national flag under the area of Bikram Police Station?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — D, None of the above. This is one of the answers the Commission revised after the objection window, and the revision is the whole lesson. The provisional key marked (a), Raghunath Singh of Gorakhari; candidates objected; and when BPSC published its final key on 31 October 2025 it moved the answer to (d) and gave its reason in a single sentence — the names given in the options are different from the true name, which the Commission states as Rang Nath Sharma alias Raghunath Sharma. Set that name beside the three printed options and the arithmetic of the revision becomes visible. Option (a) reproduces the alias's given name, Raghunath, and then attaches the wrong surname: Singh, where the Commission's record says Sharma. Option (c) keeps option (a)'s village and swaps the man entirely for one called Satyendra. Option (b) matches on nothing at all — neither Rang Nath nor Raghunath — and it substitutes a place-name the stem itself does not use. With no option carrying the correct name, the only defensible key is (d), and that is the key on which marks were finally settled. Two things follow for a student. First, the mark here went to candidates who treated the options as claims to be checked rather than as a menu with one right item; on this paper 'None of the above' is not decoration. Second, be careful how you carry this question into revision. Beyond the Commission's own remark we could not confirm this episode in an independently published source, so this card deliberately attaches no date, no village and no circumstances to it. What is safe to learn is the reason the answer is (d), and the very well documented 1942 background against which a killing of this kind sits — both of which follow below.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The near-miss, and the reason the question had to be revised at all. It carries the correct given name from the Commission's record — Raghunath — and then gets the surname wrong, printing Singh where the Commission states Sharma. Half a name is not a name, and the provisional key's mistake was to accept it. Note also that its village, Gorakhari, is reused in option (c): the paper-setter has built look-alikes around one root rather than offering three genuinely distinct candidates.  (b) Fails on both halves. 'Ram Narain' shares nothing with Rang Nath Sharma alias Raghunath Sharma — neither the given name nor the surname — and the option relocates the man to 'Bikrampur', which is not the place the stem names. The stem places the killing within the area of Bikram police station, and Bikram is a town and community development block in the Paliganj sub-division of Patna district, Bihar.  (c) The pure decoy. It borrows the village printed in option (a) so the two read like variants of a single real report, but the personal name overlaps nothing in the name the Commission gives. A candidate who half-remembers that 'something happened at Gorakhari' can be pulled towards either (a) or (c) by the village alone — which is what the pairing is built to do, and precisely why the village is the least reliable element in the option to reason from.

Concept: The act this question describes — hoisting the national flag and being shot for it — was the signature act of August and September 1942, and police stations were where it most often happened. The All India Congress Committee adopted the Quit India resolution at Bombay on 8 August 1942, and Gandhi's speech at Gowalia Tank Maidan gave it the call to Do or Die. Almost the entire Congress leadership was arrested within hours and held for most of the war, so what followed was leaderless, local and largely spontaneous: in hundreds of places the target chosen was the nearest visible piece of the state — the thana, the post office, the railway station, the treasury — and the flag over it was the point. Two killings from those weeks are documented in detail and show the pattern exactly. Kanaklata Barua, aged seventeen, led an unarmed procession to hoist the national flag at the Gohpur police station in Assam on 20 September 1942 and was shot dead; Mukunda Kakoti, who picked up her fallen flag, was shot too. Matangini Hazra, seventy-one and known as Gandhi buri, led a batch of volunteers to capture the Tamluk police station in Midnapore on 29 September 1942 and was shot in front of it. Bihar was among the provinces where the upsurge went furthest, and Viceroy Linlithgow called the movement by far the most serious rebellion since 1857. A death at a Bihar thana in that season is entirely of a piece with what is recorded elsewhere — which is why the question is plausible even though its options are not.

State PCS 2025 Q84 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q84 — History PYQ with Answer