Which of the following countries is/are NOT a member of the Gulf Cooperation Council ?
1. Bahrain
2. Iran
3. Iraq
4. Qatar
Select the correct answer from the code given below :
Code :

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — A, 2 and 3. Read the printed option text before you mark anything on this paper: the code here is not the layout most candidates have drilled, and 'Only 1' sits at (d) rather than at (a). The substance is a straight roster check. The Gulf Cooperation Council — formally the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf — has exactly six members and has had the same six since its charter was signed at Abu Dhabi on 25 May 1981: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Note what that list has in common. Every member is an Arab state, every one is a hereditary monarchy, and every one sits on the Arabian Peninsula side of the Gulf. Iran fails all three tests — it is Persian rather than Arab, it is a republic, and it lies on the opposite shore — and in fact the Council was created partly in reaction to it, the founding meeting following the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the outbreak of the Iran–Iraq War in 1980. Iraq fails two of the three: it is unmistakably an Arab state, but it is a republic, and it lies at the head of the Gulf outside the peninsular monarchies. It has never been admitted. So numbers 2 and 3 are the countries that are NOT members, while Bahrain (1) and Qatar (4) are both founding members. The question asks which are NOT members, so the answer is the pair Iran and Iraq — option (a).

Why the other options are wrong — (b) This picks out Iraq alone and quietly readmits Iran. Iraq is indeed not a member, so the option is half right, which is exactly what makes it dangerous. But Iran is not a member either, and it is the more clear-cut exclusion of the two: the GCC is a grouping of Arab monarchies, and the Council's own founding communiqué in 1981 came at a moment when its members were reacting to precisely the revolutionary Iran across the water. A candidate who confuses the GCC with OPEC lands here, because Iran is an OPEC founding member and so feels like it belongs in any Gulf oil grouping.  (c) Iraq is correctly identified, but Qatar is not. Qatar is a founding member of the GCC and has remained one continuously. The trap is a live memory of the diplomatic rupture of June 2017, when Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain, along with Egypt, severed relations with Doha and closed their borders to it — a crisis that ran until the Al-Ula summit in Saudi Arabia in January 2021. Throughout that period Qatar's GCC membership was never suspended; it was a quarrel inside the bloc, not an expulsion from it. Do not confuse it with Qatar's genuine exit from a different organisation: Qatar did leave OPEC, with effect from January 2019, to concentrate on liquefied natural gas.  (d) Bahrain is a founding member of the GCC, so naming it as the non-member is simply wrong. Bahrain is the smallest of the six, an island state joined to Saudi Arabia by the King Fahd Causeway, and it has been inside the Council since 1981. This option also carries the paper's structural trap: on a conventional UPSC code (a) would be the 'Only 1' slot, and a candidate who works out the substance correctly but then reaches for the remembered position can end up here or somewhere equally wrong. On this booklet 'Only 1' has been moved to (d).

Concept: The Gulf Cooperation Council is a regional political and economic bloc of the six Arab monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula that face the Persian Gulf. Its charter was signed at Abu Dhabi on 25 May 1981 by Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and its Secretariat-General is at Riyadh. The membership has never changed. Because three overlapping labels are attached to this part of the world — Gulf, Arab and oil-producing — the standard examination trick is to slip in a country that satisfies one label but not the one being asked about, and Iran and Iraq are the two countries built for that job.

State PCS 2025 Q136 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q136 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer