Karpoori Thakur was recently in news.

Which of the following is not true about him ?

Question

Karpoori Thakur was recently in news. Which of the following is not true about him ?

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (4). Read the stem first: the word 'not' is printed in bold, so the item asks for the one statement that is FALSE about Karpoori Thakur, and everything you can confirm about him has to be left out of the answer instead of put into it. Option (4) says he won a state assembly election in 1952 from the Samastipur constituency. He did enter the Bihar Vidhan Sabha in 1952, and he did so from Samastipur district — but the constituency was TAJPUR, which he contested as a Socialist Party candidate. Naming the district in place of the seat is the error, and it is the only definite factual mistake among the four printed lines. The other three hold. He is universally known as Jan Nayak, the people's leader, which is option (1). He is the man the phrase 'Bihar's first non-Congress Chief Minister' is habitually attached to, having taken office in December 1970 as the first socialist to head the state, which is option (2). And he was born on 24 January 1924 in the village of Pitaunjhia — since renamed Karpoori Gram in his honour — in Samastipur district, which is option (3). The reason he was in the news in the year this paper was set is that the Bharat Ratna was announced for him posthumously on 23 January 2024, on the eve of his birth centenary. Note the neat cruelty of the item's design: the same district, Samastipur, appears in the statement that is true and in the statement that is false, and the candidate has to know that a district is not a constituency.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This is true, so it cannot be the answer to a question asking what is NOT true. Jan Nayak, the people's leader, is the title by which Karpoori Thakur is universally known in Bihar politics, earned by a career built on backward-class and poor-peasant mobilisation and by a personal austerity that became proverbial. Choosing this option nearly always means the negation in the stem was missed — the bold 'not' is the single most important word in the question and it does not survive into a plain-text reading.  (b) This is the description conventionally attached to him and the paper treats it as true, so it is not the statement being sought. Karpoori Thakur became Chief Minister of Bihar in December 1970, the first socialist to hold the office, and returned to it from June 1977 to April 1979 at the head of a Janata Party government, in which term he introduced the reservation formula that carries his name. Anyone drawn to this option is usually reasoning that a Congress-dominated state must have had an earlier non-Congress chief minister, which is a live historical point but not the error the question is built on: the checkable mistake in this set is the constituency named in option (4).  (c) This is true. He was born on 24 January 1924 in Pitaunjhia village, in what is now Samastipur district of Bihar; the village was later renamed Karpoori Gram. The statement is also the reason the fourth option is so effective a trap — having just confirmed 'Samastipur district' here, a candidate reads 'Samastipur Constituency' in option (4) and lets it pass as the same fact restated. A district contains many assembly constituencies, and his was Tajpur.

Concept: Karpoori Thakur (24 January 1924 - 17 February 1988) belongs to the socialist stream of Indian politics that grew out of the Congress Socialist Party and, through Ram Manohar Lohia, made backward-class representation its central demand. Born in Pitaunjhia village in Samastipur district into a family of the Nai community, he was first elected to the Bihar assembly in 1952 from Tajpur on a Socialist Party ticket and remained an assembly figure for the rest of his life. He was Chief Minister twice — from December 1970 to June 1971, and from June 1977 to April 1979 — and his second term produced the measure for which he is remembered in policy terms: a reservation scheme of 1978 that divided the quota rather than treating the backward classes as one block, giving 12 per cent to the Other Backward Classes, 8 per cent to the Most Backward Classes, 3 per cent to women and 3 per cent to the economically backward among the upper castes. The idea that a quota can be sub-divided so that its benefit reaches the weakest within a category is his lasting contribution to Indian reservation policy, and it is why he was in the news again in January 2024, when the Bharat Ratna was announced for him posthumously on the eve of his birth centenary.

State PCS 2024 Q86 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q86 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer