Practice: Praja Mandal Movements

(c) At Bombay, on 17 December 1927. Presided over by Dewan Bahadur Ram Chandra Rao, with more than 1,500 delegates from more than 70 states.

Why not the others: (a) Ajmer 1919 is the Rajasthan Seva Sangh's move; (b) Wardha is where that Sangh was founded. Three organising events within a decade, easily merged.

(d) B. S. Pathik as Vice-Chairman and R. N. Chaudhary as Provincial Secretary. Rajasthan took seven of the seventy-five Executive Committee seats. Chaudhary's secretaryship covered Rajasthan, Central India and the Punjab States.

Why not the others: These are the Bijolia and Begun leaders, four years after Begun — the agrarian and constitutional movements were the same people in different arenas. Both are described as of Ajmer.

(a) Jaipur founded 1931; Marwar took up political work in 1934. The Jaipur body "confined its activities to the socio-economic regeneration of the people" and "was not politically active till 1938".

Why not the others: "Founded first" and "first took up political work" have different answers, and both are asked. Choosing one answer for both questions is the error.

(b) Man Mal Jain, Abhai Mal Jain and Chhagan Raj Chopasniwala. Its aim was responsible government and civil liberties.

Why not the others: (a) is what most preparation material says, and the scholarly account gives these three. Vyas belongs to the Marwar Lok Parishad of 1938 — both real, four years apart.

(c) It gave a public reception to Jawaharlal Nehru on 10 March 1936. The ban came from Prime Minister Sir Donald M. Field. Man Mal Jain and Abhai Mal Jain then founded the Nagrik Adhikar Rakshak Sabha in 1936, which was also declared illegal.

Why not the others: The trigger was affiliation to an all-India struggle, not local grievance. The body had been tolerated for two years before Nehru's visit.

(d) Calcutta, in 1936. Where rulers' measures prevented branches at home, the organisation was founded outside the state's territorial jurisdiction.

Why not the others: (b) is Sirohi's, at Bombay in 1933, and (c) is Jaisalmer's, at Jodhpur in 1945. A state's people's conference founded in Calcutta measures repression more exactly than any adjective.

(a) Only through local units called Praja Mandal or Lok Parishad. Workers in each state had to rely on their own resources.

Why not the others: That is the 1818 settlement showing through: there was no province to organise, only twenty-odd separate sovereignties each with its own law on association.

(b) Prevent British intervention in the states' internal affairs. Alongside spreading literacy and primary education and bringing grievances before the rulers. Its office was at Ajmer.

Why not the others: (a) reverses the stated aim. These early bodies asked to be left to deal with their own rulers, which is a more interesting position than loyal reformism and explains why the movement could later turn on both.

(c) Two names for the same kind of body. The AISPC's local units were variously called Praja Mandals or Lok Parishads.

Why not the others: (a) is the intuitive answer and it is wrong; the difference is local usage, not function.

(d) Karpurchand Patni — and initially it was limited to social reforms only.

Why not the others: All three are in the same sequence, which is why they work. (c) Arjunlal Sethi "enlightened the torch of public awakening in Jaipur"; after him (b) Jamnalal Bajaj founded the Charkha Sangh in 1927; (a) Hiralal Shastri was elected president in 1940. Those arrested for association with the Mandal were Shastri, Chiranjilal Agarwal, Patni and Daulat Mal Bhandari; in August 1939 the Mandal was recognised and Bajaj released; the third session met in November 1941; and in 1942 the Maharaja accepted the demand for responsible government.

(a). The other group wanted to stay with the All India Movement.

Why not the others: This division is the reason the man who led the Praja Mandal became the state's first Chief Minister rather than its most uncompromising agitator, and it belongs in any assessment of him. (c) is the opposite of the Mandal's central demand and so cannot be right of either faction.

(b) Ajmer. Dharmanarayan, then Prime Minister of Mewar, declared the Mandal illegal and ordered Verma to leave Mewar — so he left and carried on from outside.

Why not the others: (c) Deoli is where the Mewar government took him forcibly in February 1939, after which he was tortured, tried and jailed. The organisational point is the examinable one: a Praja Mandal banned in Mewar was run from Ajmer — British-administered territory — and its founder was seized at Deoli, a British cantonment town. The states could outlaw an organisation; they could not reach it once it stepped into British India, which is why Ajmer recurs throughout this chapter. The ban was lifted in February 1941 and the first session met in November 1941 under Verma, with Acharya J. B. Kripalani and Vijayalakshmi Pandit attending.

(c) Jawaharlal Nehru, at the Mewar Praja Mandal's invitation.

Why not the others: (d) K. M. Munshi belongs to the same sequence in a different role — he drafted the new constitution the Maharana gave Mewar, and the jurist drafting a princely state's constitution in 1945 is the same one who would sit on the Constituent Assembly's drafting committee. Note two other names from Mewar: the Mewar Harijan Seva Sangh's work was given to Mohanlal Sukhadia, later Chief Minister of Rajasthan, who enters public life here; and the welfare of Bhil, Mina and other tribals to Balwant Singh Mehta.

(d). The gates in Kota's walls were closed and pits were dug in every road into the city so that no help could come from outside.

Why not the others: A princely capital sealed by its own citizens is as close to a successful urban rising as this unit contains — and the outcome matched it. Diwan Sir Harilal Ghosalia and I. G. Police Onkar Singh wanted to crush it, but Maharao Bhim Singh reached an agreement with the public on 16 August 1945 through Sir Omkar Singh of Palayatha, and afterwards the King removed both the Prime Minister and the I.G. Bhim Singh later helped the integration and was made Deputy Rajpramukh of Greater Rajasthan.

(a) Nayanuram Sharma, an active member of the Rajasthan Seva Sangh founded by Vijay Singh Pathik, who began a movement in Kota against forced labour. He was later murdered by unknown persons.

Why not the others: (b) Abhinna Hari founded the Kota State Praja Mandal at Mangrol in 1939, headed by Nayanuram, with Seth Motilal as chairman of the welcome committee; after the murder the whole weight fell on him. (c) Kantilal chaired the Bundi Praja Mandal, established 1931 — where in 1936 the government banned publication of the newspaper Rajasthan and Kantilal and Nityanand ignored the ban. (d) Sagarmal Gopa was the first to rouse the people of Jaisalmer, where the first newspaper Vijay appeared only in 1920 and the board explains the lateness geographically before politically — low population, mostly desert, no transport, undeveloped communications.

(b) Tej Singh, the son of a jagirdar. A protest meeting followed, and Harinarayan Sharma, Kunj Bihari Lal Modi and others were arrested.

Why not the others: (a) Bijender Singh is the boy the British installed at Bharatpur after removing Maharaja Kishan Singh — the same instrument in the neighbouring state, which is why the option works. (c) Bhavani Shankar Sharma headed the Alwar Praja Mandal's first session in January 1944. (d) N. B. Khare was Alwar's Diwan, not a ruler.

(c). Alwar merged into the Matsya Union in March 1948.

Why not the others: (d) The Rajpramukh of the Matsya Union was the Maharaja of Dholpur, with the Maharaja of Karauli as Deputy and Shobharam Kumawat as Prime Minister. And note the join between chapters: the integration chapter records "Dr Khare" detained in Delhi with the Maharaja of Alwar on 7 February, when the Government of India took over the state's administration. The Praja Mandal chapter and the integration chapter are describing the same man and the same events from two ends.

(d). He also developed autonomous institutions in villages and towns, and paid for it: the British removed him and installed the boy Bijender Singh with an administrator to govern.

Why not the others: This is the single most useful fact in the topic because it inverts the standard framing, in which rulers obstruct and the British are incidental. In Bharatpur the obstacle to responsible government was removed by the British, and it was the Maharaja. An answer that treats princely autocracy and colonial paramountcy as one undifferentiated block cannot account for this case.

(a). Master Adityendra was its Treasurer, which is what makes (b) work; the state declared it illegal and Satyagraha began on 21 April 1938.

Why not the others: (c) Bayana hosted the second session, on 23 May 1945, and Jaynarayan Vyas chaired the first conference on 30 December 1940. (d) is Mewar. But the reason to know this: the Jaisalmer Praja Mandal was founded at Jodhpur, Bharatpur's at Rewari, and Mewar's was run from Ajmer. The Praja Mandal is, in several states, an organisation in exile — a structural fact about princely autocracy rather than a quirk of three cases.

(b) Seven of fifty. Elections were held in August 1943.

Why not the others: (a) 27 is the number of posts the Praja Mandal won, and putting the two numbers in one sentence is exactly how this is set — the Praja Mandal won 27 posts on a body of 50 of which only 7 were elective. Master Adityendra became leader and Yugal Kishore Chaturvedi deputy leader, and on discovering the committee's foul play its members boycotted it. (d) 11 is the size of the Karauli reforms committee.

(c). Dholpur was later merged with the Matsya Union.

Why not the others: (a) is also true of the same man and is the trap — the Maharaja of Dholpur was Rajpramukh of the Matsya Union, per the integration chapter, after being made to give up authority in his own state. (b) is Alwar. Hold this against the integration chapter's account, which records only that Dholpur and Karauli were too small to maintain separate existence under the Government of India's norms: the size criterion is the States Department's reason; being summoned to Delhi is what actually happened to the ruler. A structural explanation and a specific event are not alternatives.

(d). The Maharaja had appointed a committee of eleven members to suggest constitutional reforms; it was its composition, not its existence, that was refused.

Why not the others: (a) is the trap and it is precisely backwards — the committee was the Maharaja's own initiative. The quarrel was not over whether to have constitutional reform but over who sits on the committee that designs it, and a ruler who concedes the reform while refusing the representatives has conceded nothing that matters. That is the argument of the whole Praja Mandal movement compressed into one committee. The Karauli Praja Mandal was founded in 1938 under Trilok Chand Mathur, Chiranji Lal Sharma and Man Singh.

(a) The Chamber of Princes, formed at the central level of kings and Nawabs in 1921.

Why not the others: (b) is the natural answer and it is wrong, which is the whole point of the question — the AISPC was the people's body, not the princes'. Read the correct answer carefully, because it reverses the natural assumption: the Praja Mandals were not simply wrested from unwilling rulers. Their establishment was permitted on the advice of the rulers' own collective body — an institution of the paramountcy system recommending the creation of the bodies that would eventually campaign the princes out of existence. It also explains how these organisations could exist at all in states that then promptly banned them: permission was granted collectively and withdrawn individually.

(d) R is true and A false. Jaipur was founded first but was not politically active till 1938; Marwar, founded 1934, took up political work first.

(a) R explains A. The shape of the movement follows the shape of paramountcy.

(a) R is the evidence for A, and it is unusually clean: the ban followed the national connection, not the local complaint.

(a) R explains A. Sirohi's was founded at Bombay in 1933, Bikaner's at Calcutta in 1936, and Jaisalmer's at Jodhpur in 1945.

(d) R is true and A false. The 1934 founders were Man Mal Jain, Abhai Mal Jain and Chhagan Raj Chopasniwala.

(a) Kota and Alwar also date from 1938, Bharatpur from 1939 and Jaisalmer from 1940.

(a) All four were founded outside the territory they were organising for, which is the single most telling fact in the chapter.

(a) B and C are the Bijolia and Begun leaders of the previous chapter, both of Ajmer.

(b) On 29 December 1919, at the Marwari Pustakalaya, Chandni Chowk, Delhi, with Jamnalal Bajaj as President. Its headquarters were fixed at Ajmer, the centrally located British territory in Rajputana. The promoters named are Jamnalal Bajaj of Sikar, Govind Das of Jabalpur, Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi of Gwalior, Chandkaran Sarda of Ajmer, Swami Narsinghdev of Jaipur, Arjun Lal Sethi of Jaipur, B. S. Pathik of Bulandshahr and Thakur Kesari Singh Barhath of Shahpura. Its objects were to establish Seva Samitis, hold conferences, seek the co-operation of Rajasthanis living outside the region, assist the struggle against the rulers' oppression, open schools for untouchables and mount agrarian satyagraha against jagirdars; the work it claimed as its own was the Khetri agitation, the Bhutmia agitation of Jaipur, Bhil affairs in Sirohi and Bundi, and the peasant movements at Pisangan, Bisau and Bijolia.

Why not the others: (a) 1918 is the year that circulates, and it probably descends from the Congress's Delhi session of December 1918, which is also what makes (d) attractive and wrong, since the Congress met at Amritsar in December 1919, not Delhi. (c) Ajmer is where the headquarters were fixed, not where the session met.

(c). Rajasthan's seven were Nayanuram Sharma (Rajasthan Seva Sangh, Kota), Shankar Lal Verma (Rajasthan Seva Sangh, Ajmer), Jai Narayan Vyas (Marwar Hitkarini Sabha, Jodhpur), Kanhaiya Lal Kalantri (Phalodi, Jodhpur), Ram Dev Poddar, Bal Kishan Poddar and Trilok Chand Mathur (Karauli). Sharma would found Kota's movement, Mathur would lead Karauli's and Vyas would lead Marwar's: the men who ran the Praja Mandals in the late 1930s were already sitting on the all-India executive in December 1927, before most of their own state bodies existed.

Why not the others: (d) is the tempting shape of the answer and the list will not carry it. Only Shankar Lal Verma is placed at Ajmer, with Pathik and Chaudhary as office-bearers; two were from Jodhpur, one from Kota, one from Karauli. Ajmer supplied the offices, not the delegation — a body organising against princely states needed non-princely ground for its officers.

(d) Churu, 1913-14, by Swami Gopal Das, to enlighten the state's people about liberty and self-government. He reappears as one of the accused in the Bikaner Conspiracy Case.

Why not the others: (a) 1907 is the year preparation material prints: the man is real and the town is right, the year is not. (b) Ratangarh in Bikaner State had a different body, the Brahmcharya Ashrama Sadvidya Pracharini Sabha, which staged plays exposing the autocracy of the government and popularised khadi and swadeshi, but could organise no political movement because the entry of outside leaders was banned. Three other precursor bodies are asked in the same breath: the Pratap Sabha, Udaipur, 1915, by Balwant Singh Mehta; the Marwar Seva Sangh, Jodhpur, 1920, formed to ventilate grievances against a corrupt bureaucracy; and the Marwar Youth League of 1931, which put Vyas in charge of convening the Marwar State People's Conference at Pushkar on 24 and 25 November 1931 because Marwar would not allow it at home.

(a). He called it one of the anomalies of Indian unrest that the Samaj "should at the same time have associated itself so intimately with a political movement directed against British rule", and quoted Shyamaji Krishnavarma to that effect; he also recorded that many Aryas denied the charge and that the Lahore branch president assured him the Samaj confined itself to moral and religious reform. Cite him for the colonial reading of the Samaj, not as a description of what it was.

Why not the others: (b) is the flat form in which the sentence circulates, and it drops everything Chirol qualified. (c) He was writing about the Punjab. Rajasthan's Arya Samaj story is Dayananda's: the Paropkarini Sabha founded at Udaipur on 11 August 1882 at Maharana Sajjan Singh's invitation, his death at Ajmer on 30 October 1883, the Sabha's first session at Ajmer on 28 December 1883, and an Arya Pratinidhi Sabha for Rajasthan in 1888, with Chandkaran and Mankaran Sarda as the men who gave their working lives to it.

(b). "Internal struggle of people of the States must not be undertaken in the name of the Congress. For this purpose independent organizations should be started and continued where they exist already within the States." Read the two sentences together: the Congress withheld its name and for that very reason told the states' people to build bodies of their own. That is why 1938 is a cluster year. Alwar's Praja Mandal cites it as the enabling event, Kota's dormant body had "some life and activity" infused into it by it, and Gokul Bhai Bhatt returned from Bombay to Sirohi because of it, founding the Sirohi Rajya Praja Mandal in January 1939.

Why not the others: (a) inverts the resolution. A Praja Mandal was by design not a Congress branch: it demanded responsible government under the aegis of its own ruler, which is why so many constitutions carry that phrase and why the states could negotiate with them at all. The Government of Rajasthan's Pratapgarh gazetteer states the resulting position as two parallel objectives, responsible government in the state and the expansion of the freedom movement against the colonial power. Answering only one of the two misdescribes the institution.

(c). The notification of 7 March 1932 forbade people and associations from taking part in activities calculated to disturb law and order in Marwar, or to bring the administration of Marwar or of any other Indian state, or the government established by law in British India, into hatred or contempt, and it prescribed imprisonment of up to six months. The Marwar Public Society Ordinance of 1934 further curtailed civil liberty, and the Marwar Praja Mandal was founded in 1934 anyway.

Why not the others: (a) is what the summaries carry, and no such instrument is on record in the Jodhpur gazetteer or in the archive-based account: what both carry is the notification and, separately, the 1934 ordinance. (b) A Marwar Sedition Act did exist — Mathura Das Mathur was arrested under its sections 10-A and 10-B in May 1942 — but no source dates it to 1909. (d) The Jodhpur Public Societies Act is 1940, and the Lok Parishad was registered under it in 1941.

(d) Mathura Das Mathur. He had been leading a demonstration of about 10,000 people; Ranchhoddas Gattani was arrested in a lathi charge on 10 April. In June 1940 Nehru, as President of the States' People's Conference, deputed Dwarka Nath Kachru to report on Jodhpur, and Kachru found the political atmosphere so suffocating that even the registration of a typewriter was required. An agreement in June 1940 recognised the Parishad and released the political prisoners.

Why not the others: (a) Vyas was elected President at the Parishad's first representative session at Jodhpur in July 1940 and President of the Jodhpur Municipal Board in June 1941, and he was the first "dictator" of the 1942 satyagraha, arrested on 27 May 1942 under section 124-A, with Mathura Das Mathur succeeding him and arrested on 29 May. Two dictatorships, two years apart, is exactly how this is set. (b) Gattani presided the open session at Ladnu on 9 February 1942, which demanded the abolition of lag-begar. (c) Sharma was left to lead the Nagrik Adhikar Rakshak Sabha after its founders were interned in September 1936, and was arrested in November 1937.

(a). A Lok Parishad worker arrested in the 1942 satyagraha. The authorities ordered criminal prisoners to force the hunger-strikers into the barracks, and Bissa and Ranchhoddas Gattani were seriously injured; on 19 June his temperature passed 105, his request to see his father, mother, wife and children was refused, and he was carried unconscious through the afternoon heat to hospital. The police then banned his funeral procession and lathi-charged the crowd. Jodhpur's own district gazetteer records the death and the banned procession without printing his name, which is itself worth a line in a Mains answer on what official sources do and do not record.

Why not the others: (b) Chandawal, on "Responsible Government Day", was an assault with lathis and spears by about 150 men of the thikana with the Jodhpur State Police on workers coming from Sojat: over 25 injured and seven hospitalised, among them Mitha Lal Trivedi of Sojat, and a woman satyagrahi, Sushila Devi of Sojat, beaten. No death is recorded there. (c) Nanakji Bhil, shot dead by the state police in Bundi's 1926 begar and charai agitation, is Bundi's first martyr.

(b) Balwant Singh Mehta, who had also organised the Pratap birth anniversaries and the Pratap Mela at Haldighati. A body founded in 1938 was chaired by a man who had been organising public life in Mewar for twenty-three years.

Why not the others: (a) Verma was Chief Secretary and (c) Baya Vice-President; the Prime Minister who banned the body was Dharam Narayan. All three offices are asked directly. Baya was arrested on 30 September 1938 and interned in Sarara Fort without trial, six days after the ban notification of 24 September 1938; civil disobedience began on 4 October 1938 and reached Nathdwara on 11 October, where Narendra Pal Singh and Professor Narayan Das were arrested; branches were opened at Ahmedabad and Bombay; the ban was lifted in early 1941 and the body registered under the Mewar Societies Registration Act of 1941. Its stated programme was narrower than "responsible government" suggests: enforcement of the Mewar circular against forced labour, the elective principle in local bodies, and constructive work in khadi, education, removal of untouchability and abstinence from liquor.

(c) Which numbered session it was. The Government of Rajasthan's Udaipur gazetteer calls it the ninth; circulated accounts call it the seventh. What both carry is the rest: it met at the Mewar Praja Mandal's invitation from 31 December 1945 to 2 January 1946, with nearly 435 delegates from Jammu and Kashmir, Baluchistan, Rajputana, Central India, the Central Provinces, Orissa, Bastar, Manipur, Tripura, Cooch Behar, Karnatak, Hyderabad, Mysore, Punjab, Travancore, Cochin, Pudukkottai and the Western India States, and Jawaharlal Nehru opened it.

Why not the others: (a), (b) and (d) are common to both accounts, which is what makes the ordinal the only unsafe element. Where a Government of Rajasthan source and a scholarly one differ on one detail and agree on the rest, the safe answer is the detail they share.

(d) At Jodhpur, on 15 December 1945, by Mithalal Vyas, established outside the state "to avoid immediate arrest in the State". The monograph and the Rajasthan State Archives file Jaisalmer Ka Jan Andolan give the same date in the same words.

Why not the others: (b) Sagar Mal Gopa's brother, Shiv Shankar Gopa, tried to establish a Praja Parishad inside Jaisalmer in 1939 and had to leave the state at once, joining his brother at Nagpur, which is what makes (c) work. An attempt inside the state in 1939 and a founding outside it in 1945 are two different events, and (a) the stray 1940 is best read as a slipped date for the first.

(a). He then went to Calcutta and formed the Bikaner Praja Mandal there, and was also elected Secretary of the Calcutta Youth League, which is what makes (d) half true and wrong in its order. The Churu gazetteer says the same thing from the other side: "the attempt to set up the Bikaner Rajya Praja Mandal in 1935-36 was not successful."

Why not the others: (b) is the coaching form, printed without the externment that immediately followed. It converts a failure into an achievement and loses the very fact that makes Bikaner examinable. (c) The Bikaner Rajya Praja Parishad is six years later: 22 July 1942, at the house of Rawat Mal Pareekh, under the presidency of Raghubar Dayal Goyal, with Mukta Prasad Saxena, Ganga Das Kaushik and Dau Dayal Acharya. Goyal was externed within a week of announcing a movement for responsible government on 29 July 1942, re-entered the state in defiance on 26 August 1944 and was arrested, and 26 October 1944 was observed across Rajasthan as a day against Bikaner's repression; leadership then passed to Madho Ram Vaidya.

(b). Bhatt, born 25 February 1899 at village Hathal, returned from Vile Parle after the Haripura resolution and founded the body at home. In January 1940 it launched satyagraha for responsible government and the state arrested Jiwan Mal and Roop Raj; the Sirohi gazetteer treats those first arrests inside the state as the moment the movement became a mass one, and records a Reforms Committee of six in 1945 whose recommendations were never implemented.

Why not the others: (a) and (c) each pick one year out of a four-way conflict — 1933 in the monograph's own table, 1934 at Vile Parle in the same author's later chapter, April 1935 in preparation material, 1936 in the Sirohi gazetteer, which also names Bhatt its first President. What all four agree on is the shape: Sirohi men living in Bombay constituted it, and Bhatt led it. (d) The rival Seva Samiti is not in the Sirohi gazetteer. The documented case of a state raising a counter-association is Bharatpur's, where a loyalist body called the Praja Sahayak and Anjuman Riaya Sabha was formed to counteract the Praja Parishad.

(c) 19 March 1939. The movement had begun on 1 February 1939 under Bajaj, with about 500 arrests.

Why not the others: (b) is a real and separate step, not the end of the satyagraha: the state issued a communiqué on 9 March 1940 requiring the Praja Mandal to register, and on 2 April 1940 accepted its object of responsible government under the aegis of the Maharaja and its right to educate opinion and represent grievances. Recognition, March 1939; registration, April 1940; (a) August 1939 belongs to neither. The man who had declared the Mandal unlawful was Sir Beauchamp St. John, who wrote that "the State cannot accept the right of the Mandal or any other body to represent the people in the presentation of their grievances. The time has not yet come for this in Indian States", and he was followed by H. M. Todd, then Raja Gyan Nath, and only then by Sir Mirza Ismail — every one of them the British government's choice rather than the Maharaja's, which is the thread connecting the 1939 satyagraha to the 1942 negotiation.

(d). The body founded in 1931 was reorganised from 1936 onwards by Hiralal Shastri and his associates with Bajaj's encouragement, and Bajaj presided its first open session on 8 and 9 May 1938. Shastri was President by November 1941, when he made the demand for responsible government at the Sikar political conference.

Why not the others: (a) is what preparation material carries, and the Sikar report is the counter-evidence. (b) Verma belongs to Mewar, as its Chief Secretary from April 1938.

(a) The Azad Morcha. Two independent accounts give the same five men, Shastri's own associates, who opposed the compromise, left the Praja Mandal and formed their own organisation to carry on the struggle.

Why not the others: (b) The founder's name usually attached to it appears in neither account. (c) The Praja Mandal Progressive Party is a second, separate breakaway, under Chiranji Lal Agarwal. (d) belongs to Jodhpur, 1936, founded by Man Mal Jain and Abhai Mal Jain after the Marwar Praja Mandal was banned. On the compromise itself: its five terms are documented, but the monograph calls it only "the compromise made between Sawai Man Singh II of Jaipur and Hira Lal Shastri". RPSC has asked for it as the "Gentlemen's Agreement", dated 17 September 1942, so recognise the name in an option; neither the name nor the day is in the sources, and neither belongs in a Mains answer as sourced fact.

(b) August 1942. The Kota Praja Mandal launched satyagraha when Quit India began in British India; a complete hartal was observed, hundreds were arrested, and the people closed the city gates and took over the administration of the city, hoisting the tricolour over the Kotwali and compelling the police to stay in their barracks. The administration was paralysed for three days. The Dewan urged the Maharao to break through the gates with military force; Maharao Bhim Singh refused, and on the third day, on his assurance that grievances would be examined and the police would not resort to repression, the gates were reopened, the police and the army saluted the national flag, and only then did the people hand the administration back. The Dewan was dismissed afterwards.

Why not the others: (a) is the board textbook's dating. Two scholarly accounts working from state records, one of them citing the Kota Raj Patra (Extraordinary Issue) of August 1942, place the episode in Quit India, and both accounts agree that a senior official lost his post afterwards. (c) The Kota session of 23 November 1941 under Abhinna Hari is a different event, as is the "responsible government day" of 26 January 1941. (d) Kota's scaffolding runs Praja Pratinidhi Sabha 1918, legislated into a defunct society by the end of 1919 through a Public Safety Act, a Seditious Meetings Act and a Public Society Registration Act; Haroti Praja Mandal 1926 for Kota, Bundi and Jhalawar; Kota Rajya Praja Mandal 1927, which could do nothing substantial until Haripura revived it; and a fourth session at Mangrol in May 1939 under Pandit Nayanuram Sharma.

(c) 9 July 1944, its declared aim being responsible government by non-violent means. The Praja Mandal had grown out of the 1926 agitation against begar and charai in which Nanakji Bhil was shot dead, its early leaders being Gopal Sutania, Jai Lal Jhandel and Gopal Lal Kotia, and it gained strength from 1927 under Maharao Raja Ishwari Singh before repression and want of organisation reduced it to ineffectiveness.

Why not the others: (a) the nineteenth is the day that circulates, and the deeper error in it is the word "new": there is one organisation, not two, which is why a founding table saying 1944 and a state-by-state note saying 1931 under Kantilal are describing the same body from two ends. (d) is the date of the reforms proclamation, not of the renaming.

(d) Maharao Raja Bahadur Singh, 24 October 1946. Some ministers were still to be nominated by the ruler; the Constituent Assembly refused that condition, Rishi Dutt Mehta resigned over whether to join the ministry, and Brij Sundar Sharma was elected President. The Lok Parishad merged into the Congress in 1950.

Why not the others: (a) attributes the proclamation to his predecessor and moves it four years early; the state's own gazetteer gives Bahadur Singh and 1946. (b) Bhim Singh is Kota's Maharao, and moving him into a Bundi question is the commonest way this is set.

(a). Article 2 of its 1938 Constitution and Rules reads: "To attain by all responsible and legitimate means such form of government as may be responsible to the people under the aegis of His Highness." Registration was refused, the wording Maharaja Tej Singh would accept being "the progressive association of the people with the administration of the State", and it worked as an unregistered body for two years while its Secretary, Hari Narayan Sharma, was arrested; the evidence is the Praja Mandal's own letter of 24 February 1939 to the Chief Minister of Alwar. A name on paper from about 1928, a constituted organisation in 1938, and a working office by 1940 are not describing the same thing, and both dates are defensible.

Why not the others: (b) and (d) appear in neither scholarly account nor in the Alwar district gazetteer, whose record of Alwar's demands is agrarian almost throughout: the mass Kisan meeting the Praja Mandal called at the jagir village of Khera Mangal Singh on 2 February 1946, when nearly all the important leaders were arrested in a swoop the previous night and the meeting was held anyway, with about 7,000 people attending. The same gazetteer records that as far back as 1921 a school teacher, Brij Narain Acharya, encouraged his students to burn foreign caps and wear khaddar ones, and that the Maharaja replied by forbidding caps and making the pagri compulsory headgear for every student in the state.

(b). Its stated objects were to represent grievances to the Durbar, advocate administrative reforms, educate opinion, improve the lot of the people, and work for communal harmony and unity. Up to the end of 1939, 473 people including some women had been detained, 202 prosecuted and convicted, mostly under the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 1937, and 49 released; their sentences were remitted and the remaining political prisoners freed at the "Teej Durbar" in August 1940. The examinable fact is the rename: after December 1939, Bharatpur's body is a Praja Parishad.

Why not the others: (a) December 1940 is the year that circulates for the same event. Two other Bharatpur sequences are set the same way. The British did not install the boy and the administrator together: Maharaja Kishan Singh, born 4 October 1899, was placed on the gadi in 1900 after Ram Singh's deposition; in 1928 he was not allowed to return to the state and D. G. Mackenzee, I.C.S., was appointed administrator, and was greeted with black flags; Kishan Singh died on 27 March 1929 and Brijendra Singh, born 1 December 1918, was installed on 14 April 1929. And Lord Wavell and Maharaja Shardul Singh of Bikaner were due at Bharatpur for shooting on 5 January 1947, the Praja Parishad's demonstration being staged at the railway station on the evening of 4 January, when the Bikaner ruler arrived; on 15 January a detachment of state forces led by the ruler's youngest brother marched over the picketers.

(c) Shanker Rao Deo. The District Magistrate, Satgur Prasad, had banned all public meetings and processions in Dholpur for a month on 11 November 1947; the conference passed resolutions on responsible government, corruption and black-marketing, and the state police again brought in hired goondas and looted the shops and houses of the Praja Mandal's sympathisers.

Why not the others: (a) is the name preparation material attaches to this conference. The dates are right; the name is not. (b) Sitaramayya, Vice-President of the AISPC, wrote to the Maharaja on 30 August 1947 asking for an inquiry into the looting and arson at Tasimo, and deputed Hiralal Shastri and Gokul Bhai Bhatt to establish the facts. (d) Krishna Dutt Paliwal presided at the Dholpur Rajya Praja Mandal's establishment in 1936, with Moolchand as Secretary; its second session at Tasimo village on 12 November 1946 was broken up by the state police with hired goondas, a volunteer corps was raised on 23 December 1946, and the editors of Sainik, the Amrit Bazar Patrika and Hindustan were ordered out of the state in March 1947 for trying to reach the village. Tasimo carries one more trap worth separating. The Bharatpur gazetteer, which covered Dholpur as a sub-division, names Thakur Chattar Singh and Pancham Singh as killed when the Deputy Superintendent opened fire, and dates that firing to 1945; the archives file describes the 12 November 1946 attack without a firing; and the 8 April 1947 date of the coaching notes appears in neither. Carry the two names; do not carry the date.

(d) 27 February 1948. The monograph, citing V. P. Menon, and the Government of Rajasthan's 2023 Karauli gazetteer give the same date.

Why not the others: (a) is the day that circulates, one digit out. (b) 4 March 1948 was Udaibhan Singh's birthday, on which he had intended to announce his own scheme of constitutional reforms, and he was overtaken by the Delhi meeting. (c) is the date of the Bharatpur shooting engagement of 1947, a different state and a different year; conflating a princely shoot with the accession meetings is a real slip, not an invented one.

(a). Madan Singh had sat in satyagraha against begar on 24 February 1924. It was the first satyagraha in the state to last more than one day, running for two, and on the third day, with mass support behind it, the three demands were conceded and the fast was ended.

Why not the others: (b) Pooran Singh is a real Karauli figure — the jailor of Karauli, dismissed from service for his sympathies with the Praja Mandal, and President of the Karauli Rajya Praja Mandal addressing a public meeting on 29 December 1946 — but the 1924 fast is not his, on the state's own gazetteer. (c) Thakur Onkar Singh is the man that gazetteer has elected chief when it dates the Praja Mandal's formation to April 1939, against the monograph's 1938 founding under Trilok Chand Mathur, Chiranji Lal Sharma, Kalyan Das Gupta, Krishna Prasad, Puran Singh, Ram Gopal and Man Singh; the April 1939 event reconciles the two accounts if it is read as a session, at which six demands were set out. (d) Gangaprasad Shastri of Bharatpur supported Thakur Pooran Singh's non-violent struggle and spoke at the Panchayati Mandir at Karauli; the struggle there is traced to 1912, and a meeting at Saledi Bhawan on 11 July 1915 decided to set up a library, later renamed the Sahitya Parishad.

(b). Ojha and Kantia took their lead from Manikya Lal Verma. Asawa's "Prime Minister" title belongs elsewhere: he headed the first Rajasthan Union from 25 March 1948 until Udaipur joined it on 18 April 1948.

Why not the others: (a) and (c) are the good story and the wrong one. A princely state installing a Praja Mandal man as its head on the eve of Independence would be the best instance in this topic of the movement taking power, which is exactly why the 14 August 1947 version travels. The remaining states are dated the same way: Banswara 1945 on the state's own district gazetteer, not 1943; Kushalgarh 1944, by Dadam Chand Joshi, Bhanwar Lal Nigam, Uchhab Lal Mehta and Vardhman Gadia, not 1942; Dungarpur 1945, with no record anywhere for the circulated "26 January 1944"; and (d) Pratapgarh 1945, under Chuni Lal Prabhakar and Amrit Lal Payak, which holds. In Jhalawar a police file of 19 May 1947 states that there was no Praja Mandal activity in the state during the Second World War, which cannot be reconciled with a "25 November 1946" founding under a different President; what is verified there is more striking, that in 1946 Jhalawar formed a popular ministry and the ruler himself became one of its members.

(c) 8 August 1895. Its declared object was "to bring abuses wherever they exist to the notice of the authorities with the object that they may be set right with an attitude of an impartial Judge". About a year and a half later a member of the Jaipur Regency Council sued its editor for libel; he was sentenced to a year and a half in prison and both papers closed.

Why not the others: (a) is printed as "Thursday the 8th August, 1885" in one scholarly account, and its own weekday refutes it: 8 August 1885 was a Saturday, 8 August 1895 a Thursday. The same author's bibliography lists the paper's run as 1895, and the Ajmer district gazetteer gives 1895. (b) Rajasthan Samachar, founded by Munshi Samrath Dan Charan, a disciple of Swami Dayananda, is itself disputed: 1889 in the archive-based account, 1898 in the Ajmer gazetteer, and both years are printed by serious sources. (d) The 1849 Bharatpur claim is in no district gazetteer or scholarly account read for the chapter: recognise it in an option, do not assert it.

(d) Amrit Lal Seth, on his own statement in the presidential address to the Rajputana State People's Convention at Beawar on 31 December 1933. The booklet exposed the maladministration of the state and the denial of liberty while Maharaja Ganga Singh was in London, and it is the direct cause of the Bikaner Conspiracy Case: arrests on 13 January 1932 of Satya Narain Vakil, Khub Ram, Swami Gopal Das, Chandan Mal and Badri Prasad; the Public Safety Act of 1932, which the people called the Kala Kanoon; a Bikaner Political Case Committee formed by Rajasthanis in Bombay on 23 September 1933; "Bikaner Day" observed at many places in British India on 17 December 1933; and judgment on 8 January 1934 by D. M. Nanawati, Sessions Judge, Bikaner, seven of the eight accused sentenced to terms from six months to two and a half years.

Why not the others: (a) is the name coaching notes attach, and it appears in no account read for the chapter. (b) Vyas's pamphlets are Marwar's: Popan-Bai-Ki-Pol, distributed with Anand Raj Surana at a public meeting on 19 September 1929, for which Vyas, Surana and Bhanwar Lal Saraf were sentenced by the Special Tribunal at Nagaur to terms of three to five years, and later Marwar Mein Uttardayi Shasan and Jodhpur Ki Sthiti Par Prakash. (c) Mukta Prasad Saxena and Raghubar Dayal Goyal are the two young advocates who took the defence in the Conspiracy Case when no Bikaner lawyer would risk his career, and the losing made them the founders of the Bikaner Rajya Praja Parishad ten years later.

(d) R is true and A false. The movement in Karauli had never been directed against the ruler, and November 1946 is Karauli's own first time, not Rajputana's — Marwar and Mewar had been demanding responsible government from 1934 onwards. Recognise the inflated claim; do not repeat it.

(a) R explains A: "Due to the mutual differences, Jaipur could not lead the other States of Rajasthan during the 'Quit India' movement." Where a question asks which Praja Mandal stood aside in 1942, the answer the record supports is Jaipur. What Jaipur got instead was constitutional machinery: a special committee on constitutional reforms appointed on 26 October 1942 under R. S. Hiriannaiya, which reported in 1943 in 119 paragraphs with a note of dissent by every non-official member; reforms proclaimed on 1 January 1944; two houses inaugurated in September 1945, a Representative Assembly of 125 and a Legislative Council of 51; and the Praja Mandal taking 3 Council seats and 27 of the 31 it contested in the Representative Assembly.

(a) Rajasthan Kesari was the organ of the Rajasthan Seva Sangh and of its sister body the Rajputana-Madhyabharat Sabha, which shared a common membership. Naveen Rajasthan, with Ram Narayan Chaudhary as publisher doing most of the work, was banned and restarted as Tarun Rajasthan, for which Arjun Lal Sethi and Kesari Singh Barhath wrote, Jamnalal Bajaj paid for the printing machines, and Jai Narayan Vyas, exiled from Marwar, settled at Beawar and edited it, attacking the Jodhpur government from there. Two more names complete the family: Nav Jyoti, Ajmer, founded by Ram Narayan Chaudhary, whose year is given as 1936 in the Ajmer gazetteer's newspapers chapter and 1938 in the same volume's history chapter; and, from Delhi, Riyasat and Princely India, which ran special columns on the politics of the different states of Rajputana.