Given below are two statements, one is labelled as Assertion (A) and the other as Reason (R).
Assertion (A) : Turkish invasion on India was successful.
Reason (R) : There was no political unity in Nor

Question

Given below are two statements, one is labelled as Assertion (A) and the other as Reason (R).
Assertion (A) : Turkish invasion on India was successful.
Reason (R) : There was no political unity in North India.
Select the correct answer from the codes given below :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — A, both (A) and (R) are true and (R) is the correct explanation of (A). Test the Assertion first. The Turkish invasion did succeed, and the measure of success is that it did not stop at plunder. Mahmud of Ghazni's raids in the first quarter of the eleventh century took wealth and left, annexing only the Punjab; but Muizz-ud-din Muhammad bin Sam, whom Indian textbooks call Muhammad Ghori, came to stay. He took Multan in the mid-1170s, took Lahore from the last Ghaznavid in 1186, lost the first battle of Tarain to Prithviraj III Chauhan in 1191, returned and won the second battle of Tarain in 1192, and defeated Jayachandra of Kannauj at Chandawar in 1194. When he died in 1206 his slave-general Qutb-ud-din Aibak set up an independent sultanate at Delhi, and Turkish rule in north India lasted, in one dynasty or another, for the next three centuries. That is a successful invasion by any definition. Now the Reason, which is also true. Twelfth-century north India was not a state but a field of rival kingdoms: the Chahamanas at Ajmer and Delhi, the Gahadavalas at Kannauj, the Chandelas in Bundelkhand, the Chaulukyas in Gujarat, the Paramaras in Malwa, the Senas in Bengal, each with its own tributary chiefs, and each more often at war with its neighbours than with any outsider. And the Reason genuinely explains the Assertion, which is why the code is (a) and not (c). The disunity was not a background condition; it operated at every decisive moment. Prithviraj Chauhan faced Ghori at Tarain with a large but improvised coalition and no help at all from Jayachandra of Kannauj, his standing enemy. When Prithviraj was beaten in 1192 there was no second front and no alliance to absorb the blow — the Turks simply moved on to Kannauj in 1194 and destroyed the next kingdom in isolation, and a few years later Bakhtiyar Khalji rode into Bihar and Bengal and unseated the Senas with a strikingly small force. Each Indian kingdom fought its own war, lost it alone, and was absorbed. Historians of the period add other causes and you should know them — the Turks' fast, well-drilled cavalry of mounted archers against Indian armies built around elephants and slow feudal levies, a single unified command against contingents owing loyalty to different chiefs, and a narrow, caste-bound military recruitment against a system that drew fighters from wherever it could. But those are strengths that could be neutralised by a united defence, and Tarain in 1191 proved it: a single Indian coalition beat Ghori in the field. It was the failure to build that coalition again, or to keep it, that turned a defeat in one battle into the loss of north India. The absence of political unity is therefore the explanation the Assertion needs, not merely a true statement standing beside it.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) The Assertion is not false. Some candidates reason that the Turks were repulsed more than once — Ghori was beaten by the Chaulukyas of Gujarat in the late 1170s and by Prithviraj at the first battle of Tarain in 1191 — and conclude that the invasion failed. Those were setbacks inside a campaign that succeeded. The second battle of Tarain in 1192, Chandawar in 1194 and Bakhtiyar Khalji's conquest of Bihar and Bengal within the following decade left a Turkish sultanate ruling from Delhi in 1206. An invasion that founds a three-hundred-year state has succeeded.  (c) This is the option that costs marks, because it applies the right instinct to the wrong item. Both statements are indeed true, but here the Reason is the standard historical explanation of the Assertion, not an unrelated fact set beside it. Political fragmentation is exactly what let the Turks fight the Chahamanas, the Gahadavalas and the Senas one at a time, and it is why the single defeat at Tarain in 1192 was not absorbed by an alliance. Choosing (c) would be defensible only if disunity had no bearing on the outcome — and the campaign record shows it had a decisive bearing.  (d) The Reason is not false. There was no paramount power in north India after the Pratiharas declined in the tenth century; what remained was a mosaic of regional kingdoms — Chahamana, Gahadavala, Chandela, Chaulukya, Paramara, Sena and others — held together internally by samanta chiefs who owed conditional service and were frequently at war with one another. The Chahamana–Gahadavala hostility is the best-documented case, and it is why Prithviraj stood at Tarain without Kannauj beside him.

Concept: Between the decline of the Pratiharas in the tenth century and the Turkish conquest, north India was organised as a set of regional kingdoms under a samanta or feudatory system: land was assigned to subordinate chiefs in return for military service, so a king's army was an assembly of contingents rather than a standing force under one command. Contemporary Indian politics treated rival kings, not distant invaders, as the enemy that mattered, and a defeat could therefore end a kingdom without alarming its neighbours. The Ghurid campaigns of 1175–1206 exploited exactly this structure, and the sultanate that Qutb-ud-din Aibak founded at Delhi in 1206 was, in its early decades, essentially a military administration in which conquered territory was parcelled out as iqtas to Turkish commanders.

State PCS 2024 Q45 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q45 — History PYQ with Answer