In Chhatarpur's Charan Paduka firing incident, who gave the order to open fire on the crowd ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — A, G.T. Fisher. The commission's key names Fisher as the British officer who ordered the firing at Charan Paduka in Chhatarpur district, in the Bundelkhand region of what is now Madhya Pradesh. Accounts of the episode place it on 14 January 1931, when a gathering connected with the national movement assembled at Charan Paduka on the bank of the Urmil river and was fired on; because of the scale of the killing at an unarmed assembly, the site is remembered in Bundelkhand as the region's Jallianwala Bagh.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) Not the officer recorded for Charan Paduka. The paper surrounds the correct name with other British-sounding names so that a candidate who has only heard of the incident cannot reason the answer out.  (c) A decoy military title-and-name of the kind that fits many colonial episodes, but it is not the name attached to the Charan Paduka firing in the commission's key.  (d) Another 'Major X' decoy. Note the pattern — three options carry a rank, one does not; the answer here is the plain-named one, Fisher.

Concept: Bundelkhand's freedom struggle ran through princely states and British-administered pockets where the usual instruments of colonial control — bans on assembly, on the national flag and on 'seditious' meetings — were enforced by armed police. Charan Paduka in Chhatarpur district is one of the places where that enforcement turned into mass firing on an unarmed gathering during the agitation years around 1930, the year the Civil Disobedience Movement began. Local memory of MP's freedom struggle is built around a handful of such sites, and MPPSC quarries them for one-fact questions.

State PCS 2025 Q99 — Madhya Pradesh GK PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q99 — Madhya Pradesh GK PYQ with Answer