Arrange the following events in a chronological order and select the correct answer from the codes given below :
I. Appointment of Simon Commission
II. Jallianwala Bagh Massacre
III. Mahatma Gandhi's

Question

Arrange the following events in a chronological order and select the correct answer from the codes given below :
I. Appointment of Simon Commission
II. Jallianwala Bagh Massacre
III. Mahatma Gandhi's Dandi March
IV. Death of Ferozshah Mehta
Codes :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — A, IV, II, I, III. The four events fall in this order. Pherozeshah Mehta, the Moderate leader known as the 'Lion of Bombay' and Congress President at the Calcutta session of 1890, died on 5 November 1915 (IV). The Jallianwala Bagh massacre took place on 13 April 1919, when General Dyer's troops opened fire on a Baisakhi-day gathering at Amritsar that had assembled against the Rowlatt Act and the arrest of Saifuddin Kitchlew and Satyapal (II). The Simon Commission was appointed on 8 November 1927 by the British government under Stanley Baldwin, with Sir John Simon as chairman of an all-British body of seven members in total (Simon included; Clement Attlee was among them), to review the working of the Government of India Act, 1919 (I). Finally, Gandhi launched the Dandi March on 12 March 1930, walking from Sabarmati Ashram to the coast and breaking the salt law at Dandi on 6 April 1930 (III). So 1915, 1919, 1927, 1930 — that is IV, II, I, III.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) It opens with the Simon Commission and only then places Jallianwala Bagh and Mehta's death — reversing the true order completely at the front. The Commission belongs to 1927, eight years after the massacre and twelve years after Mehta died.  (c) It puts the Dandi March of 1930 second and pushes Mehta's death and the Simon Commission after it. Mehta died in 1915, well before every other event on this list, so no sequence that places him third or fourth can be right.  (d) The most tempting wrong option, because it correctly opens with Mehta's death — and then inverts everything after it, running Dandi (1930), Jallianwala Bagh (1919) and the Simon Commission (1927) backwards. Getting the first item right is not enough in a sequencing question; check the tail as carefully as the head.

Concept: These four events are milestones of four different phases of the national movement, which is why they can be ordered from memory even without exact dates. Mehta's death in 1915 closes the era of Moderate, petition-based politics — Gokhale had died in February of the same year and Gandhi returned from South Africa in January 1915. Jallianwala Bagh in 1919 is the shock that ends any lingering faith in British justice and opens the age of Gandhian mass movements. The Simon Commission of 1927 belongs to the constitutional battles of the late 1920s, which produced the Nehru Report and the Poorna Swaraj resolution. The Dandi March of 1930 opens the Civil Disobedience Movement.

State PCS 2019 Q135 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2019 Q135 — History PYQ with Answer