Indian Political Thought Questions and Answers

Answer: C

The key gives Only B.

The passage says Gandhi wanted villagers to be self-sufficient in food and to weave their own cloth, and to turn away from what industry offers. Industrialising villages would therefore take away the skills villagers use to provide for themselves, which is statement B.

Statement A reverses his view, since he believed industrialisation did not help the mass of the poor. The passage says nothing about culture (C) or about the beauty of villages (D), so those cannot be drawn from it. The question's reasons are not spelled out in the passage, so B is the one reading that fits its wording.

Answer: A

The passage says the rural ideal did not appeal to those who inherited the reins of political power, so the answer is Only C.

Statement C restates that sentence of the passage almost word for word.

Statements A and D describe people who shared his views on industry and self-sufficiency, the opposite of those who rejected the ideal, and B (those who called him the father of the nation) is not said to have rejected it. So the options with A, B or D are wrong.

Answer: D

Neither conclusion follows. The statements say that the socialist approach developed in India during the freedom movement and that Indian socialism grew during the two world wars, which is the twentieth century.

Conclusion I puts the beginning in the fifth century B.C. and Conclusion II puts the growth in the seventeenth century A.D.; both contradict the time frame in the statements. So the option that neither follows is correct.

Answer: B

It was B. R. Ambedkar.

In the Constituent Assembly on 4 November 1948 Ambedkar asked what the village is 'but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism', and he welcomed the Draft Constitution's choice of the individual, not the village, as its unit. In 1927 he led the Mahad Satyagraha to assert the right of Dalits to draw water from the Chavdar tank.

Gandhi idealised village republics, Nehru did not use these words, and Bhagat Singh had no part in the Mahad Satyagraha.

Answer: B

The correct match is a-3, b-1, c-4, d-2.

• India in Transition (1922) is by Manabendra Nath Roy, his Marxist analysis of Indian society.
• My Picture of Socialism is by Jayaprakash Narayan.
• The Story of My Experiments with Truth is M. K. Gandhi's autobiography.
• Annihilation of Caste (1936) is by B. R. Ambedkar.

Gandhi's autobiography and Ambedkar's speech are the anchors; only option B places both correctly.

Answer: A

Satyagraha is a weapon to oppose violence by non-violence.

For Gandhi, satyagraha, 'holding fast to truth', is the method of resisting injustice and violence by non-violent means: the satyagrahi accepts suffering rather than inflicting it, and seeks to convert the opponent rather than defeat him.

Civil disobedience is one technique of satyagraha, not its definition, and participation by the people is a feature of its mass campaigns rather than what it is. It is in no sense a weapon of violence.

Answer: B

The correct reason is only (c), the Rowlatt Act.

In 1919 the government passed the Rowlatt Act, which allowed detention without trial. Gandhi called a nationwide hartal and satyagraha against it in April 1919, his first all-India movement.

The Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 13 April 1919 took place during the protests against the Rowlatt Act, so it could not have been the reason for launching them. The Communal Award was announced in 1932, and disappointment with the post-war reforms was part of the background but not the declared target, so the codes with (b) or (d) are wrong.

Answer: A

Congress was represented by Mahatma Gandhi.

After the Gandhi-Irwin Pact of March 1931, the Congress agreed to attend the Second Round Table Conference in London (September to December 1931) and named Gandhi as its sole representative. The conference failed over the communal question.

Nehru did not attend. Srinivasa Sastri and B. R. Ambedkar did attend, but as representatives of the Liberals and the depressed classes, not of the Congress.

Answer: D

The Lahore Session was presided over by Jawaharlal Nehru.

At the Lahore Session of December 1929, with Nehru as President, the Congress adopted the resolution for Purna Swaraj (complete independence). The tricolour was hoisted on the banks of the Ravi, and 26 January 1930 was celebrated as Independence Day.

Motilal Nehru presided over the Calcutta Session of 1928, Gandhi over the Belgaum Session of 1924, and Subhas Chandra Bose over the Haripura (1938) and Tripuri (1939) sessions.

Answer: D

The resolution was passed in Mumbai.

The All India Congress Committee adopted the Quit India resolution on 8 August 1942 at Gowalia Tank Maidan (written 'median' in the paper) in Bombay, where Gandhi gave his call of 'Do or Die'. The ground is now called August Kranti Maidan.

Kolkata, Chennai and Lucknow hosted other Congress sessions, but the Quit India resolution belongs to Bombay, and the leaders were arrested there the next morning.