Given below are two statements, one is labelled as Assertion (A) and the other as Reason (R).
Assertion (A) : Balban made his government firm and centralised all authority in his hands.
Reason (R) : H

Question

Given below are two statements, one is labelled as Assertion (A) and the other as Reason (R).
Assertion (A) : Balban made his government firm and centralised all authority in his hands.
Reason (R) : He wanted to protect the north-west frontier against Mongol invasions.
Select the correct answer from the codes given below :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, both (A) and (R) are true, but (R) is not the correct explanation of (A). Take the truth of each limb first, then the causal link between them, because that is the discipline an assertion-reason item is testing. (A) is true and is the single most familiar fact about Balban. He ruled from 18 February 1266 to 13 January 1287, after already holding real power for twenty years as naib and vizier to the nominal Sultan Nasiruddin Mahmud from 1246. As Sultan he broke up the Turkan-i-Chihalgani, the group of forty Turkish nobles of which he had himself been a member; raised the crown above the nobility with an explicit theory of divine kingship, taking the title Zill-i-Ilahi, Shadow of God, describing the office as niyabat-i-khudai, the vice-regency of God, and claiming descent from the legendary Turkish hero Afrasiyab; imposed the Persian court ceremonies of sijda, prostration, and paibos, kissing the sovereign's feet; kept a sober and formal court; reorganised the army under a separate military department; and ran a network of barids, secret news-writers in every department answerable to him alone. He crushed the Mewatis around Delhi, restored order in the Doab and Katehar, and went in person to put down Tughril Khan's rebellion in Bengal. That is centralisation by any reading. (R) is also true as a statement of fact. The Mongol danger on the north-west was Balban's first strategic problem, and he answered it by fortifying and garrisoning the frontier line, by posting his elder son Prince Muhammad at Multan and his second son Bughra Khan at Samana, and by deliberately refusing distant conquests so that his field army stayed within reach of Delhi. Prince Muhammad was killed fighting the Mongols at the Beas on 9 March 1285 and is remembered as Khan-i-Shahid, the martyr prince. So neither limb is false, which removes (b) and (d) at once. What fails is the causal claim in (a). Balban's absolutism was aimed inwards, not outwards. The Sultanate he inherited had been hollowed out by two decades of puppet sultans after Iltutmish, during which real power sat with the Chihalgani; his target was that oligarchy and the lost prestige of the crown, and every instrument he chose — the theory of kingship, the ceremonial, the destruction of the Forty, the spies, the blood-and-iron suppression of internal disorder — is an instrument against his own nobility and his own subjects. The Mongol threat explains a different and separate set of decisions: the defensive frontier policy, the fortification of the north-west, and his refusal to campaign in the Deccan or even to recover Malwa and Gujarat. Both facts are true; the second does not produce the first. Hence (c). One honest qualification, because a thoughtful student will feel the pull of (a): the two are not unrelated, and some textbooks do argue that only a strong centre could hold the frontier. But the standard causal account of Balban's absolutism runs through the Chihalgani and the prestige of the monarchy, and the commission's key reads the two limbs as independently true — which is what (c) says.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The designed trap, and it fails only on the causal link, not on the facts. Balban's centralising measures are directed at his own court and countryside — breaking the Chihalgani, the theory of divine kingship, sijda and paibos, the barids, the extermination of the Mewatis, the reconquest of Bengal. None of them is a frontier measure. The Mongol danger explains why he fortified the north-west and why he refused distant campaigns; it is a constraint on his policy rather than the motive for his absolutism. Remember the general rule this item is teaching: two true statements about the same ruler are not automatically cause and effect.  (b) (A) is not false — it is the best-attested generalisation about Balban's reign, and Ziauddin Barani, the chronicler on whom our picture of the period rests, is emphatic about it. The Chihalgani was destroyed, the ceremonial was imposed, the espionage system was built and the internal risings were put down. There is nothing in the assertion to reject.  (d) (R) is true as well. The Mongol threat on the north-west was real and continuous through Balban's reign, and his response is well documented: a fortified and garrisoned frontier, his elder son Prince Muhammad stationed at Multan and Bughra Khan at Samana, and a settled policy of not undertaking distant expeditions. Prince Muhammad's death in battle against the Mongols at the Beas on 9 March 1285 is the clearest proof that the danger and the frontier arrangements were both genuine.

Concept: Balban's reign is the point at which the Delhi Sultanate stops being a Turkish military confederacy and becomes a monarchy. Iltutmish had governed with the help of a body of senior Turkish nobles later remembered as the Turkan-i-Chihalgani, the Forty; after his death in 1236 those nobles made and unmade sultans for thirty years, and Balban, one of their own, watched the process from inside. On taking the throne in 1266 he set out to make the sultan unanswerable to them. His method was ideological as much as coercive — a borrowed Sasanian-Persian theory in which the king is the shadow of God on earth and his person must be approached with prostration — and it was backed by an intelligence service and a reorganised army. Alongside this he faced, for the whole of his reign, Mongol pressure on the Punjab frontier, which he met by fortifying rather than by conquering.

State PCS 2024 Q150 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q150 — History PYQ with Answer