Arrange the following events in the correct order.
i. White paper
ii. Poona pact
iii. Nehru report
iv. Dharasna Satyagraha

Question

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Correct — option (3), 'iii, iv, ii, i'. Date the four events and the sequence writes itself. Statement iii, the Nehru report, is the earliest: the All Parties Conference appointed a committee under Motilal Nehru to draft a constitution for India after Lord Birkenhead's challenge that Indians could not agree among themselves, and the report was submitted in August 1928, proposing dominion status, a declaration of fundamental rights and joint electorates with reservations. Statement iv, the Dharasana satyagraha, comes next: it belongs to May 1930, in the Civil Disobedience movement that followed the Dandi march, when volunteers led by Sarojini Naidu with Imam Sahib and Manilal Gandhi advanced in waves on the salt works at Dharasana in Gujarat after Gandhi's arrest, and were beaten down by police in an assault that the American correspondent Webb Miller reported to the world. Statement ii, the Poona pact, is 24 September 1932, concluded in Yerwada jail between Gandhi, then on a fast unto death, and Dr Ambedkar; it replaced the separate electorates that the Communal Award of August 1932 had given the Depressed Classes with a larger block of seats reserved for them inside joint electorates. Statement i, the White paper, is March 1933: after the Round Table Conferences the British government published its proposals for Indian constitutional reform, they were examined by a Joint Select Committee under Lord Linlithgow, and out of that process came the Government of India Act of 1935. So the order runs 1928, 1930, 1932, 1933 — iii, iv, ii, i — and only option (3) prints it. Note that the list moves through four distinct phases in five years: constitution-making by Indians, mass civil disobedience, a communal settlement forced by a fast, and constitution-making by Britain.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This option opens with the Dharasana satyagraha and buries the Nehru report in third place, which reverses the two events that most clearly belong the other way round. The Nehru report was submitted in August 1928 and Dharasana took place in May 1930, and the causal link runs from the first towards the second: when the report's demand for dominion status went unanswered, Congress declared Purna Swaraj at Lahore in December 1929 and launched civil disobedience in 1930. Only the LAST position is right here. Against the correct order — Nehru report (August 1928), Dharasana (May 1930), Poona pact (September 1932), White paper (March 1933) — this option matches on the White paper alone: the Poona pact sits second when it belongs third, and the Nehru report sits third when it belongs first. Three of the four positions are displaced. What makes the option tempting is not that it is nearly right but that it ends correctly, and an ordering question is often checked from its last entry backwards.  (b) This option places the White paper second, immediately after Dharasana, and pushes the Nehru report to the very end. Both moves are wrong by several years. The White paper of March 1933 could not precede the Poona pact of September 1932, and the Nehru report of August 1928 cannot be the last of these four events by any reading. The likely cause of the error is treating 'White paper' as a generic term and attaching it to some earlier British statement rather than to the specific 1933 document that led through a Joint Select Committee to the Government of India Act of 1935. Constitutional documents need to be dated individually, because their names are all interchangeable-sounding.  (d) This option begins with the Poona pact, which is in fact the third of the four events, and it therefore gets every position except the last one wrong. It is the choice of a candidate who ranks these events by prominence rather than by date — the Poona pact is the most famous item on the list, so it drifts to the front. Chronology questions punish that instinct specifically. The safeguard is to write a year against each item before looking at the options at all: 1928, 1930, 1932, 1933 here, which fixes the sequence before any option can suggest one.

Concept: The five years from 1928 to 1933 carry the national movement from its own constitution-making to Britain's, and the four items in this list are the milestones of that passage. The Nehru report of August 1928 was the Indian answer to the taunt that Indians could not produce an agreed constitution; it asked for dominion status, listed fundamental rights, and rejected separate electorates in favour of joint electorates with reservations — a rejection that cost it Muslim League support and produced Jinnah's Fourteen Points. When dominion status was not conceded, the Lahore session of December 1929 adopted Purna Swaraj, and the Civil Disobedience movement opened with the Dandi march in March 1930; Dharasana in May 1930 is its most widely reported episode, because the beating of unresisting volunteers was cabled abroad by Webb Miller and did lasting damage to British claims about the character of their rule in India. The communal question then returned in a sharper form: the Communal Award of August 1932 offered the Depressed Classes separate electorates, Gandhi began a fast unto death against it in Yerwada jail, and the Poona pact of 24 September 1932 substituted reserved seats within joint electorates. The White paper of March 1933 gathered the government's own proposals, and after scrutiny by a Joint Select Committee they became the Government of India Act of 1935.

State PCS 2023 Q7 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q7 — History PYQ with Answer