Consider the following Political Parties and arrange them in the chronological order of their establishment.
I. Bahujan Samaj Party
II. Samajwadi Party
III. Telugu Desham Party
IV. All India Trinamool

Question

Consider the following Political Parties and arrange them in the chronological order of their establishment.
I. Bahujan Samaj Party
II. Samajwadi Party
III. Telugu Desham Party
IV. All India Trinamool Congress
Select the correct answer from the code given below.
Code :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, III, I, II, IV — that is, Telugu Desam Party, then Bahujan Samaj Party, then Samajwadi Party, then All India Trinamool Congress. The Telugu Desam Party is the oldest of the four, founded in 1982 by the film star N. T. Rama Rao, and it formed a government in Andhra Pradesh soon afterwards. The Bahujan Samaj Party came next, founded by Kanshi Ram on 14 April 1984 — Ambedkar Jayanti, a date he chose deliberately — after he had spent the previous years building BAMCEF in 1978 and DS-4 in 1981 as the movement's scaffolding. The Samajwadi Party followed in 1992, formed by Mulayam Singh Yadav out of the Janata Dal's splintering. The All India Trinamool Congress is the youngest, founded in 1998 by Mamata Banerjee after she broke with the Indian National Congress in West Bengal. The four therefore run 1982, 1984, 1992, 1998, and only option (c) reproduces that sequence. Day-level dates for three of the four (29 March 1982 for the TDP, 4 October 1992 for the SP, 1 January 1998 for the AITC) are widely reported but we could not confirm them against a primary source, so treat the YEARS as the load-bearing facts — which is all the question turns on.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Puts the Samajwadi Party first and the Telugu Desam Party third. That is a decade out of place: the TDP was founded in 1982, ten years before the SP in 1992.  (b) The lazy guess that the order printed in the question is the answer. It puts the BSP (1984) ahead of the TDP (1982), which is the one comparison a candidate is most likely to get wrong.  (d) Gets the first and last entries right — TDP oldest, Trinamool youngest — but reverses the middle pair. The BSP (1984) is eight years older than the Samajwadi Party (1992), not younger.

Concept: These four parties mark the two waves that broke the Congress system. The first is the regional-identity wave of the early 1980s, of which the Telugu Desam Party is the classic case — a party built on Telugu self-respect that captured a State from the Congress almost immediately. The second is the social-justice and Mandal-era wave of the late 1980s and 1990s, which produced the BSP's Dalit-Bahujan mobilisation and the SP's backward-class and minority coalition in Uttar Pradesh. The Trinamool Congress belongs to a third pattern altogether: a personal breakaway from the Congress that grew into the dominant party of its State.

State PCS 2022 Q16 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q16 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer