Choose the correct option considering the following statements.
a. Ramesh Bais is appointed as the Governor of Maharashtra.
b. Earlier he was the Governor of Tripura State.
c. He belongs to Chhattisga

Question

Choose the correct option considering the following statements.
a. Ramesh Bais is appointed as the Governor of Maharashtra.
b. Earlier he was the Governor of Tripura State.
c. He belongs to Chhattisgarh State.

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (4). This question prints only THREE statements, labelled a., b. and c. in lower case, and all three are true, so the option that admits all of them is the answer. Statement a is correct: Ramesh Bais was appointed Governor of Maharashtra and took office on 18 February 2023, succeeding Bhagat Singh Koshyari, whose term ended on 17 February 2023 after he had asked to be relieved. Statement b is correct: Bais had earlier been Governor of Tripura, holding that office from 29 July 2019 to 13 July 2021. This is the statement most likely to be doubted, and the doubt is instructive rather than fatal — between Tripura and Maharashtra he was Governor of Jharkhand, from 14 July 2021 to 17 February 2023, so Jharkhand and not Tripura was the office he held immediately before coming to Raj Bhavan in Mumbai. But the statement does not say 'immediately before'; it says 'earlier he was the Governor of Tripura State', and that is exactly true. Reading the claim a statement actually makes, rather than the stronger claim it resembles, is the whole skill this item tests. Statement c is correct: Bais was born in Raipur on 2 August 1947, in what was then the Central Provinces and Berar and is now Chhattisgarh, and he belongs to that State. With all three statements standing, options (1), (2) and (3), each of which admits only one or two of them, are all incomplete, and option (4) is the answer.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) 'Only a is correct' admits the appointment to Maharashtra and rejects both of the other statements, which is the choice of a candidate who followed the February 2023 news but knows nothing of the Governor's earlier career. The appointment itself was widely reported, since Bhagat Singh Koshyari's tenure in Maharashtra had been politically contentious and his departure was news in its own right; the successor's name travelled with that story. But statement b and statement c are both independently true — Bais was Governor of Tripura from 2019 to 2021, and he was born in Raipur and belongs to Chhattisgarh. In a question that offers cumulative options of this shape, choosing the narrowest is not the safe course it appears to be. It is a positive assertion that the other two statements are false, and it must be defended as such rather than chosen as a hedge.  (b) 'a and b both are correct' gets the appointment and the earlier Tripura tenure right and then rejects the statement about which State the Governor belongs to, which is also true. Ramesh Bais was born on 2 August 1947 at Raipur, then in the Central Provinces and Berar and now the capital of Chhattisgarh, and his political career was made there. The reason a candidate rejects statement c is usually that it feels like a different kind of claim from the other two — a biographical detail rather than an office — and biographical details are the ones people are least confident about. But the convention that a Governor is appointed to a State other than the one he belongs to actually supports statement c rather than undermining it: a Governor of Maharashtra who belongs to Chhattisgarh is exactly what that convention predicts.  (c) 'a and c both are correct' accepts the appointment and the home State and rejects the Tripura tenure, and it is the most understandable of the three wrong answers. A candidate who remembers that Ramesh Bais came to Maharashtra from Jharkhand will read statement b, see Tripura where Jharkhand should be, and strike it out. The trouble is that statement b claims only that he was 'earlier' Governor of Tripura, and he was: 29 July 2019 to 13 July 2021 in Tripura, then 14 July 2021 to 17 February 2023 in Jharkhand, then Maharashtra from 18 February 2023. A career with three governorships makes 'earlier' true of two different States, and the statement does not claim to name the most recent. Half-knowledge is more dangerous than none here, because the candidate who knows about Jharkhand is precisely the one who will reject a statement that is correct as written.

Concept: The Governor is the constitutional head of a State, appointed by the President under Article 155 and holding office during the President's pleasure under Article 156, ordinarily for a term of five years. The qualifications in Article 157 are minimal — a citizen of India who has completed thirty-five years of age — and Article 158 requires that the Governor not be a member of either House of Parliament or of a State Legislature and hold no other office of profit. Around these bare provisions a set of conventions has grown: that a Governor is normally appointed to a State other than the one to which he belongs, that the Chief Minister of the State is consulted, and that a Governor may be transferred from one State to another during the five-year term, which is how careers like Ramesh Bais's — Tripura, then Jharkhand, then Maharashtra — come about. The office matters far more than its ceremonial description suggests, because the Governor appoints the Chief Minister, decides when a party has been shown to command a majority, reserves Bills for the President's consideration under Article 200, and reports to the President under Article 356. In Maharashtra the office had been in the news through 2022 and into 2023 for precisely these discretionary functions.

State PCS 2023 Q87 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q87 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer