Who of the following was sent as representative of labourers by Indian Government in the Washington Summit of I.L.O. in the year 1919 ?

Question

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Marked answer per the official UPPSC key — (a), V.P. (B.P.) Wadia. Flagged honestly: mainstream and authoritative sources instead document N.M. Joshi (option b) as India's workers' delegate to the first International Labour Conference held at Washington in October–November 1919. The ILO's own history and the Government of India's V.V. Giri National Labour Institute credit Narayan Malhar Joshi — founder of the All India Trade Union Congress (1920) — as the labour representative, and standard answer keys to this exact question also give N.M. Joshi. B.P. Wadia (founder of the Madras Labour Union, 1918) was a leading labour figure of the period, but no source records him as the 1919 delegate. Option (a) is retained only because the answer is fixed by the commission's key; it is not supported by the historical record.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) Marked wrong by the official key — but this is in fact the answer most sources support: N.M. Joshi is widely documented (ILO history; Govt of India's VVGNLI) as India's workers' delegate to the 1919 Washington ILC, and he went on to found the AITUC in 1920. Students should be aware that the key and mainstream sources disagree here.  (c) C.F. Andrews ('Deenabandhu') was an English priest and Gandhi associate who campaigned on indentured-labour and welfare issues, but he was not India's official workers' delegate to the 1919 ILO conference.  (d) Joseph Baptista was a Bombay-based nationalist and Home Rule leader who was also active in trade unionism, but he did not represent Indian labour at the 1919 Washington ILC.

Concept: The ILO was created in 1919 under Part XIII of the Treaty of Versailles as an autonomous body affiliated to the League of Nations, built on a tripartite structure in which each member state's delegation includes government, employer and worker representatives. British India was a founding member and had to nominate a workers' delegate to the first International Labour Conference, held at Washington in October–November 1919. Identifying that first labour representative is the point of this question.

State PCS 2020 Q16 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2020 Q16 — History PYQ with Answer