SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 26 September 2024, Shift 3 · General Awareness · Question 1 of 100

Text as printed on a candidate's response sheet for this shift; answer per SSC's tentative key as marked on that sheet. Solution last reviewed 10 September 2026.

Where this paper and its answers come from

SSC does not publish CGL question papers or a public answer key. The questions and options here are reproduced as printed on a candidate's own response sheet for this shift — the Commission's text, unchanged. Each answer is SSC's tentative key as marked on that sheet; SSC allowed challenges to it and never publishes a final key. The solutions are written by UnlockIAS.

In which of the following places did Mahatma Gandhi, along with other Indians, establish the Natal Congress to fight against racial discrimination?

(a)South Africa
(b)France
(c)England
(d)India

Answer

Why

Correct — A. Gandhi was in South Africa, working as a lawyer for the Indian merchant community of the colony of Natal, when he founded the Natal Indian Congress at Durban in 1894.

Its immediate target was the colony's franchise bill and the disabilities piled on Indian settlers. It gave Gandhi his first working model of a political body — subscriptions, petitions, press work — which he carried home two decades later.

Why the others are wrong

(b)
France — Wrong country. Natal was a British colony on the south-east coast of Africa and the organisation takes its name from it. France has no part in Gandhi's career as an organiser.
(c)
England — England is where Gandhi read for the bar at the Inner Temple and was called in 1891. He studied there, but he built no political organisation there.
(d)
India — Tempting, because the name echoes the Indian National Congress. But the Natal Indian Congress was founded for Indians settled in Natal, long before Gandhi returned to India in 1915.

Concept

Gandhi's South African years, 1893 to 1914, are where his method was assembled.

He arrived on a one-year legal brief for a Porbandar merchant firm, stayed two decades, and moved from petitions and journalism to satyagraha — open, disciplined, mass defiance of a named law.

The Natal Indian Congress of 1894 belongs to the first phase: a constitutional pressure group modelled on the Indian National Congress and funded by merchant subscriptions.

Its work was to put the grievances of Natal's Indians before the colonial government and the British public.

The paper writes 'Natal Congress'; the body's own name was the Natal Indian Congress. Match on the distinctive word — Natal — which is a place, and the answer follows from geography alone.

Key facts

Gandhi founded the Natal Indian Congress at Durban in 1894, in the British colony of Natal, now part of South Africa.
He went to South Africa in 1893 on a legal brief and returned to India in 1915.
Natal was one of the four colonies that formed the Union of South Africa in 1910.
Satyagraha was first used in South Africa, against laws aimed at Indian settlers.

Study next

Gandhi's South African campaigns against the registration law and the 1913 miners' marchChamparan, Kheda and Ahmedabad, his first three satyagrahas in IndiaThe founding and early demands of the Indian National Congress in 1885

Common traps

Reading 'Natal Congress' as an Indian body because the name resembles the Indian National Congress.
Mixing the phases — the Natal Indian Congress petitioned, it did not launch civil disobedience.

SSC keeps returning to Gandhi's career by place: Champaran is asked on 10 Sep 2024, 09:00, GA Q.20 and again on 11 Sep 2024, 12:30, GA Q.10, and the Dandi March's viceroy on 12 Sep 2024, 16:00, GA Q.11.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.