Match the correct pairs of extension centers of Swadeshi Movement and their concerned persons.
(a) Mumbai
(b) Delhi
(c) Punjab
(d) Madras
(i) Chidambaram Pillai
(ii) Lala Lajpat Rai
(iii) Lokmanya Til

Question

Match the correct pairs of extension centers of Swadeshi Movement and their concerned persons.
(a) Mumbai
(b) Delhi
(c) Punjab
(d) Madras
(i) Chidambaram Pillai
(ii) Lala Lajpat Rai
(iii) Lokmanya Tilak
(iv) Syed Raza Haider

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (2), '(a) - (iii), (b) - (iv), (c) - (ii), (d) - (i)'. The Swadeshi movement began as a Bengal agitation against the partition announced in 1905, but it did not stay in Bengal, and the standard accounts name a leader for each region into which it was carried. Working through the printed pairs: Mumbai, statement (a), goes with (iii) Lokmanya Tilak, who took the swadeshi and boycott programme into Bombay and Poona through the Kesari and the Maratha and through the Ganapati and Shivaji festivals he had already built into instruments of mass politics. Delhi, statement (b), goes with (iv) Syed Raza Haider — the name is usually written Syed Haider Raza in the histories, and this paper prints the two parts in the other order. Punjab, statement (c), goes with (ii) Lala Lajpat Rai, who carried the movement there together with Ajit Singh, an agitation that alarmed the government enough for both men to be deported to Mandalay in 1907. Madras, statement (d), goes with (i) Chidambaram Pillai, that is V. O. Chidambaram Pillai, who gave swadeshi its most concrete commercial expression by floating the Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company at Tuticorin in 1906 to run ships against the British-owned line, and who was jailed and broken for it. That set of four pairings is option (2) exactly. The useful anchor in this question is Mumbai and Tilak: three of the four printed options accept the Punjab pairing with Lala Lajpat Rai, so it discriminates nothing, and the item is actually decided by whether the candidate places Tilak in Bombay rather than in Delhi or Madras.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This option is right about Punjab and Madras but transposes the first two: it puts Syed Haider Raza in Mumbai and Tilak in Delhi. Tilak's base was Poona and Bombay, where his newspapers and his festivals gave the swadeshi and boycott programme a ready-made audience, and he had no organising role in Delhi; Syed Haider Raza is named for Delhi in the standard accounts. Because only one pair is moved, this is the near-miss option — the kind that catches a candidate who checks two pairings, finds them right, and stops.  (c) Here only the Punjab pairing survives. Syed Haider Raza is moved from Delhi to Mumbai, Chidambaram Pillai is moved from Madras to Delhi, and Tilak is placed in Madras. The Chidambaram Pillai error is the most easily caught of the three: his whole enterprise was maritime and southern, centred on Tuticorin in the Madras presidency, where the Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company he launched in 1906 challenged the British shipping monopoly on the Colombo run — an activity that could not have been conducted from Delhi.  (d) Every pair in this option is wrong. Chidambaram Pillai is put in Mumbai, Lala Lajpat Rai in Delhi, Syed Haider Raza in Punjab and Tilak in Madras. It is the option for a candidate guessing without any of the four anchors, and it is worth noticing what makes it detectable at a glance: it is the only option that does not pair Punjab with Lala Lajpat Rai, the one association almost every candidate holds securely, so even partial knowledge should remove it immediately.

Concept: The Swadeshi movement of 1905 is the first agitation in Indian politics with a national reach and a positive economic programme rather than only a set of demands. Its four elements were boycott of British goods, the promotion of Indian manufactures, national education outside government institutions, and passive resistance. Bengal supplied the trigger — Curzon's partition, announced in 1905 and given effect on 16 October, when the day was observed with mourning and the tying of rakhi as a symbol of unity — but the Extremist leadership deliberately spread the programme beyond it, and the regional leaderships that emerged are what this question tests. The movement's economic wing produced real enterprises, of which V. O. Chidambaram Pillai's Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company is the most famous, and its educational wing produced national schools and colleges. The partition was annulled in 1911, but the techniques developed in these years — boycott, picketing, mass festivals, national education — became the standard repertoire of the movement thereafter.

State PCS 2024 Q15 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q15 — History PYQ with Answer