Before the formation of 'All India States Peoples' Congress' at the national level, which of the following organizations was active in Kolhapur to raise the concerns of the people ?

Question

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Correct — option (1), Lok Sabha. The first thing to see is that this question is not about Parliament. Three of the four names offered are familiar today as the names of constitutional chambers — the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha of the Union Parliament and the Vidhan Sabha of a State legislature — and none of those bodies existed at the time the question is about. The Constitution came into force on 26 January 1950 and the first Lok Sabha was constituted in 1952, whereas the All India States Peoples' Conference held its first session at Bombay in December 1927. One point about that name, since the question prints it differently: the stem calls the national body the All India States Peoples' Congress, while the organisation founded in 1927 was the All India States People's Conference — अखिल भारतीय संस्थानी प्रजा परिषद. The paper's wording is reproduced above exactly as it is printed, in both columns, and nothing in the question turns on the difference; but a reader searching for 'States Peoples' Congress' will not find the body this question is about. The question is therefore asking about an organisation working inside a princely state a full generation before independence, and the answer is a name that happens to be spelt like a modern chamber. Read in its own period, the name is transparent: the Marathi column prints it as two words, लोक सभा, and it means simply an assembly of the people. That is the family of names the people's movements of the princely states used. The All India States Peoples' Conference, when it was founded in 1927 to give those scattered movements a common platform, was a federation of bodies that were 'variously called Praja Mandals or Lok Parishads' — people's associations and people's councils — and a Kolhapur body called the Lok Sabha belongs to exactly that family. Its purpose was the standard purpose of such bodies: to place the grievances of the subjects of a princely state before its ruler and administration, in states where there was no elected legislature and no press freedom of the kind British India had won. The Kolhapur context is worth carrying with the answer. Kolhapur was the senior Maratha princely state, ruled by descendants of Shivaji through the line of Tarabai's son, and by the 1920s it had behind it the reforming reign of Shahu Maharaj, who ruled from 1894 to 1922 and had already given his subjects a reservation order in 1902 and free and compulsory primary education in 1917. It was a state, in other words, with an unusually politically awake population, which is why an organised body for the ventilation of popular grievances appeared there early. Kolhapur acceded to the Dominion of India on 14 August 1947 and was merged into Bombay State on 1 March 1949. The answer to be marked is option (1).

Why the other options are wrong — (b) The Rajya Sabha is the Council of States, the upper house of the Parliament of India, created by the Constitution and first constituted in 1952; it is a permanent body that cannot be dissolved, its members are chosen by the elected members of the State and Union Territory legislatures rather than directly by the people, and the Vice-President of India is its ex-officio Chairman. Nothing about it belongs to the world of the princely states in the 1920s. The option is included because the four names in this question are deliberately drawn from the same verbal family, so that a candidate who does not know the Kolhapur body has to guess among three chamber names and one religious society. It is worth pausing on the word sabha itself, which simply means an assembly and was used across nineteenth and twentieth century India for organisations of every description — the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha of 1870, the British Indian Association, the Bombay Presidency Association — long before the Constitution attached it to particular chambers.  (c) The Vidhan Sabha is the Legislative Assembly of a State under the Constitution of India, provided for by Article 170 and elected directly by the people of the State for a term of five years unless dissolved earlier. Like the Rajya Sabha, it is a post-1950 constitutional institution and cannot have been active in Kolhapur before 1927. There is a further reason the option is wrong in principle rather than merely in date: a princely state had no legislature of this kind at all. Its ruler governed through a Dewan and an administration, with at most an advisory or nominated council, and the whole point of the praja mandal movement was that subjects of the states had neither the vote nor the representative institutions that British India had been granted in stages by the Acts of 1909, 1919 and 1935. A body raising grievances in Kolhapur was therefore necessarily an association of the people, not a chamber of a legislature.  (d) The Paropkarini Sabha is a real organisation, which is what makes it the most instructive of the wrong options, but it belongs to a different movement, a different region and a different purpose. It was founded by Swami Dayanand Saraswati, the founder of the Arya Samaj, on 16 August 1880, and was registered at Ajmer in Rajasthan in February 1883; Dayanand willed his property and his works to it, and it exists to continue his religious and educational mission, publishing his writings and maintaining institutions at Ajmer. It is a religious and philanthropic body of the Arya Samaj, not a political association of the subjects of a princely state, and it has no connection with Kolhapur. A candidate who recognises the name will recognise it correctly as Dayanand's foundation, which is precisely why it is offered here as the one plausible-looking historical organisation among three constitutional chambers.

Concept: About two-fifths of the territory of India before independence lay outside British India, in some five hundred and sixty princely states that acknowledged British paramountcy but were governed by their own rulers. The subjects of these states shared none of the political rights that were being won next door: the reforms of 1909, 1919 and 1935 applied to British India, so the states had no elected legislatures, no responsible ministries, and often no protection for the press or for public meeting. The response was the praja mandal movement — associations of the people formed inside individual states to demand civil liberties and responsible government, called by various names, among them praja mandal, praja parishad and lok parishad. The All India States Peoples' Conference was created to give these scattered bodies a common platform, and held its first session at Bombay in December 1927. The Indian National Congress kept its distance from the movement for over a decade, on the view that agitation inside the states was the states' own business, and changed course only in 1939, when Jawaharlal Nehru became president of the Conference and held that office until 1946. After independence the Conference dissolved itself on 25 April 1948 and its constituent units merged into the Congress, the sole exception being the Jammu and Kashmir National Conference. Kolhapur, the senior Maratha state and the seat of Shahu Maharaj's reforms, acceded to India on 14 August 1947 and merged into Bombay State on 1 March 1949.

State PCS 2022 Q86 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q86 — History PYQ with Answer