Who among the following resigned from the Viceroy's Executive Council, saddened by the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre ?
1. Chettur Sankaran Nair
2. Ishwari Prasad
3. Muhammad Shafi
4. Iqbal Narain Gurtu
Se

Question

Who among the following resigned from the Viceroy's Executive Council, saddened by the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre ?
1. Chettur Sankaran Nair
2. Ishwari Prasad
3. Muhammad Shafi
4. Iqbal Narain Gurtu
Select the correct answer from the code given below :
Code :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — D, Only 1: Chettur Sankaran Nair. Read the letter off the page, because this booklet does not follow the layout most candidates have drilled — here 'Only 1' sits at (d) and the two-name codes occupy (a) and (b). Sankaran Nair was the sole Indian member of the Viceroy's Executive Council, appointed in 1915 with the education portfolio, and he gave up that seat in 1919 in protest at the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 13 April and the martial-law regime imposed on Punjab. It was the single most conspicuous act of official protest by an Indian inside the government of the day, and it cost him a position no other Indian then held. He was no radical: a Madras High Court judge, Congress President as far back as the Amravati session of 1897, and a lifelong constitutionalist who would later quarrel bitterly with Gandhi. That is precisely what gave the resignation its force. He continued the fight in print, publishing 'Gandhi and Anarchy' in 1922, which attacked Sir Michael O'Dwyer, the Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab, for his part in the repression. O'Dwyer sued him for libel in London, and in 1924 the Court of King's Bench found for O'Dwyer by eleven votes to one, awarding 500 pounds in damages and 7,000 pounds in costs; Nair refused to apologise and paid. None of the other three names sat on the Viceroy's Executive Council in April 1919, so none of them could have resigned from it. The answer is the single name, statement 1 alone, and on this paper that is option (d).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Neither name works. Ishwari Prasad (1888–1986) was a historian of medieval India who taught at the University of Allahabad and wrote on the Tughluqs, Humayun and the Mughal Empire; he received the Padma Bhushan in 1984 and was elected three times to the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Council from the graduates' constituency — a provincial body, and decades later. He was never a member of the Viceroy's Executive Council. Mian Muhammad Shafi is the sharper trap, because he genuinely was a member of that council — but he JOINED it in July 1919, serving from 1919 to 1924 with education and health and later law, and acting as vice-president of the Governor-General's Executive Council between 1922 and 1925. He entered the council in the year Nair left it; he did not resign from it over Amritsar.  (b) Repeats the Muhammad Shafi error — a man who came into the Viceroy's Executive Council in July 1919 and stayed on it until 1924, later knighted KCSI — and adds Iqbal Narain Gurtu, a Banaras educationist and public figure whose work lay in provincial and civic life rather than in the Government of India's cabinet. The Viceroy's Executive Council was a very small body with only one Indian member at the time, which is the fact that quietly disposes of every multi-name option here: if only one Indian sat on it, only one Indian could resign from it.  (c) Iqbal Narain Gurtu was not a member of the Viceroy's Executive Council and so cannot be the answer. This option is attractive only because it has the right shape — a single name — and a candidate who has correctly worked out that the answer must be one person, but cannot recall which, may reach for it. In this booklet the single-name options are deliberately split between (c) and (d), so shape alone will not carry you; the identification has to be made.

Concept: The Viceroy's Executive Council was the small cabinet that ran British India, and after the Morley-Minto reforms of 1909 it carried a single Indian member. In 1915 that seat went to Chettur Sankaran Nair, who took the education portfolio. When General Dyer's troops fired on the Baisakhi gathering at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar on 13 April 1919 and Punjab was placed under martial law, Nair resigned it. The gesture matters in the standard narrative because it belongs to a cluster of high-status renunciations that followed the massacre and turned a provincial atrocity into a national rupture — Rabindranath Tagore renounced his knighthood at the end of May 1919, and Gandhi returned his Kaiser-i-Hind medal the following year during Non-Cooperation.

State PCS 2025 Q147 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q147 — History PYQ with Answer