Who was the founder of 'Hindustan Socialist Democratic Union' ?

Question

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Correct — B, Yateendranath, Ajay Ghosh, Phanindranath Ghosh. Two things need saying plainly about this item. First, the organisation: 'Hindustan Socialist Democratic Union' is a loose English rendering of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association — in Hindi Hindustan Samajwadi Prajatantra Sangh — which was formed when the older Hindustan Republican Association was reorganised at a meeting in the ruins of Feroz Shah Kotla, Delhi, on 8–9 September 1928, the word 'Socialist' being added to mark the group's new commitment to a socialist republic. Second, the naming of 'the founder': the standard histories do not give an agreed founding trio for that 1928 meeting, and the names usually associated with it form a much wider group — Chandrashekhar Azad, Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Bhagwati Charan Vohra, Shiv Verma, Jaidev Kapoor, Vijay Kumar Sinha, Kundan Lal, Phanindra Nath Ghosh and Ajoy Ghosh among them. Two of the three names in the keyed option, Ajoy Ghosh and Phanindra Nath Ghosh, do appear in those accounts of the reorganised association; the third, printed here as 'Yateendranath', cannot be identified with confidence from the spelling given. So the honest position is this: the key marks (b), two of its three names are genuine HSRA figures, and calling any trio 'the founder' of the HSRA goes beyond what the sources support. What makes (b) the answer in practice is elimination — the other three options each contain a name that cannot belong.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) None of these three names appears in the standard accounts of the Hindustan Republican Association of 1924 or of its reorganisation as the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association in 1928. The option is built out of names that resemble those in the other choices — note 'Faneendra Banerjee' set against the 'Phanindranath Ghosh' of the keyed option — which is a common device for making a wrong list look familiar.  (c) Two problems, either of which is fatal. 'Vyomesh Chandra' is Womesh Chandra Bonnerjee, the first president of the Indian National Congress at its Bombay session in 1885, who died in 1906 — he cannot be a founder of a body created in 1928. And Sachindra Nath Sanyal belongs to the earlier Hindustan Republican Association, founded at Kanpur on 3 October 1924, and to its manifesto 'The Revolutionary'; he is not part of the 1928 reorganisation.  (d) This option gives the full name, Vyomesh Chandra Banerjee, which removes any doubt — W. C. Bonnerjee, first president of the Congress in 1885, died in 1906, twenty-two years before the HSRA was formed. The anachronism alone rules the option out, and Sachindra Nath Sanyal again belongs to the 1924 HRA rather than the 1928 body. Ajay Ghosh's presence is what makes the option tempting; the other two names destroy it.

Concept: Revolutionary nationalism in north India runs through two linked organisations. The Hindustan Republican Association was founded at Kanpur on 3 October 1924 by Ram Prasad Bismil, Sachindra Nath Sanyal, Jogesh Chandra Chatterjee, Sachindra Nath Bakshi, Yogendra Shukla and Ashfaqulla Khan, with the aim of an armed overthrow of British rule and the establishment of a federal republic. Its most famous action was the Kakori train robbery of 1925, and the executions and life sentences that followed broke its first generation of leaders. The survivors, joined by a younger and more explicitly left-wing group from Punjab and the United Provinces, met at Feroz Shah Kotla in Delhi on 8–9 September 1928 and reconstituted it as the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, with Chandrashekhar Azad as commander-in-chief of its armed wing. The change of name mattered: the new body did not merely want the British gone, it wanted a socialist republic, and its subsequent actions — the killing of the police officer Saunders in Lahore, the bomb thrown in the Central Legislative Assembly in 1929, Bhagat Singh's prison writings — were designed as propaganda for that programme.

State PCS 2022 Q70 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q70 — History PYQ with Answer