Exam-useful questions from this chapter, grouped by marks, each with a full model answer. Try writing the answer yourself first, then check it against this one.
1 1-Mark Questions
Q. What was the ‘two-nation theory’?
Answer: It was the theory advanced by the Muslim League that India consisted of not one but two ‘people’, Hindus and Muslims. That is why the League demanded Pakistan, a separate country for the Muslims. The Congress opposed this theory and the demand for Pakistan.
Q. Who was the ‘Frontier Gandhi’ and what was his stand on partition?
Answer: Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan, the undisputed leader of the North Western Frontier Province, was known as ‘Frontier Gandhi’. He was staunchly opposed to the two-nation theory. His voice was simply ignored and the NWFP was made to merge with Pakistan.
Q. What was the Instrument of Accession?
Answer: It was the document signed by the rulers of most of the princely states, which meant that their state agreed to become a part of the Union of India. Before 15 August 1947, peaceful negotiations had brought almost all states whose territories were contiguous to the new boundaries of India into the Indian Union through it.
Q. What was the Standstill Agreement?
Answer: It was the agreement the Nizam of Hyderabad entered into with India in November 1947, for a year, while negotiations with the Indian government were going on. The Nizam wanted an independent status for Hyderabad, so it was a way of buying time rather than acceding.
Q. Name the princely states whose accession proved more difficult than the rest.
Answer: Junagadh, Hyderabad, Kashmir and Manipur. Junagarh was settled after a plebiscite confirmed people’s desire to join India, and the chapter takes up Kashmir separately in Chapter Seven.
Q. Who were the Razakars?
Answer: The Razakars were the para-military force the Nizam unleashed on the people of Hyderabad when the movement against his rule gathered force. The atrocities and communal nature of the Razakars knew no bounds: they murdered, maimed, raped and looted, targeting particularly the non-Muslims.
Q. What was the Vishalandhra movement?
Answer: Vishalandhra was the name given to the movement for a separate Andhra. It demanded that the Telugu speaking areas should be separated from the Madras province, of which they were a part, and be made into a separate Andhra province.
Q. How many states and union territories did the States Reorganisation Act of 1956 create?
Answer: Fourteen states and six union territories. The Act was passed on the basis of the report of the States Reorganisation Commission, which had been appointed in 1953.
Q. What is meant by paramountcy?
Answer: Paramountcy, also called suzerainty of the British crown, was the arrangement under which the Princely States enjoyed some form of control over their internal affairs as long as they accepted British supremacy. It was announced just before Independence that paramountcy would lapse with the end of British rule.
Q. Name the three writers whose partition writings the chapter carries, with the work of each.
Answer: Faiz Ahmed Faiz, for ‘The Dawn of Freedom’, translated from the Urdu poem Subh-e-azadi; Amrita Pritam, for ‘Today I call Waris Shah’, translated from the Punjabi poem Aaj Akhan Waris Shah Nun; and Saadat Hasan Manto, for the short story ‘Hospitality Delayed’, translated from the Urdu Kasre-Nafsi.
2 2-Mark Questions
Q. What were the three kinds of challenges that independent India broadly faced?
Answer: First, and most immediate, to shape a nation that was united yet accommodative of the diversity in our society. Second, to establish democracy, because a democratic constitution is necessary but not sufficient and democratic practices had to be developed in accordance with it. Third, to ensure the development and well-being of the entire society and not only of some sections, which meant evolving effective policies for economic development and the eradication of poverty.
Q. Why did Pakistan come into being as two separate territories?
Answer: Because there was no single belt of Muslim majority areas in British India. There were two areas of concentration, one in the west and one in the east, and there was no way these two parts could be joined. So it was decided that the new country, Pakistan, would comprise two territories, West and East Pakistan, separated by a long expanse of Indian territory.
Q. What all got divided at Partition, apart from territory?
Answer: It was not merely a division of properties, liabilities and assets, or a political division of the country and the administrative apparatus. What also got divided were the financial assets, and things like tables, chairs, typewriters, paper-clips, books and also musical instruments of the police band. The employees of the government and the railways were also ‘divided’. Above all, it was a violent separation of communities who had hitherto lived together as neighbours.
Q. Why did the lapse of paramountcy threaten the existence of a united India?
Answer: Because it meant that all the princely states, as many as 565 in all, would become legally independent, and the British government took the view that they were free to join either India or Pakistan or remain independent if they so wished. The decision was left not to the people but to the rulers, so there was a very real possibility that India would get further divided into a number of small countries.
Q. State the three considerations that guided the government’s approach to the princely states.
Answer: Firstly, the people of most of the princely states clearly wanted to become part of the Indian union. Secondly, the government was prepared to be flexible in giving autonomy to some regions, the idea being to accommodate plurality and adopt a flexible approach in dealing with the demands of the regions. Thirdly, in the backdrop of partition, which brought into focus the contest over demarcation of territory, the integration and consolidation of the territorial boundaries of the nation had assumed supreme importance.
Q. What distinction does the chapter give Manipur, and how did it earn it?
Answer: Manipur was the first part of India to hold an election based on universal adult franchise. Under the pressure of public opinion the Maharaja, Bodhachandra Singh, held elections in Manipur in June 1948, and the state became a constitutional monarchy.
Q. Why did the national leadership postpone the creation of linguistic states after Independence?
Answer: Our leaders felt that carving out states on the basis of language might lead to disruption and disintegration, and that it would draw attention away from the other social and economic challenges the country faced. The need for postponement was also felt because the fate of the Princely States had not been decided, and because the memory of partition was still fresh.
Q. What was the task of the States Reorganisation Commission? What was its most salient recommendation?
Answer: The Commission was appointed by the Central Government in 1953, under the pressure of the struggles for linguistic states, to look into the question of redrawing of the boundaries of states. Its most salient recommendation was that the boundaries of the state should reflect the boundaries of different languages. On the basis of its report the States Reorganisation Act was passed in 1956, which led to the creation of 14 states and six union territories.
3 4-Mark Questions
Q. Explain the four difficulties that arose in carrying out the partition on the principle of religious majorities.
Answer: The principle meant that areas where the Muslims were in majority would make up the territory of Pakistan and the rest would stay with India, but it produced four difficulties. First, there was no single belt of Muslim majority areas in British India; there were two areas of concentration, one in the west and one in the east, which could not be joined, so Pakistan came into being as West and East Pakistan separated by a long expanse of Indian territory. Second, not all Muslim majority areas wanted to be in Pakistan: Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan, the ‘Frontier Gandhi’, was staunchly opposed to the two-nation theory, but his voice was simply ignored and the NWFP was made to merge with Pakistan. Third, Punjab and Bengal had very large areas where the non-Muslims were in majority, so both provinces were bifurcated according to the religious majority at the district or even lower level, and this could not be decided by the midnight of 14-15 August, so a large number of people did not know on the day of Independence which country they were in. Fourth, and most intractable, was the problem of ‘minorities’ on both sides of the border, who found themselves undesirable aliens in their own home.
Q. Describe the consequences of Partition for ordinary people, using the chapter’s own figures.
Answer: The year 1947 was the year of one of the largest, most abrupt, unplanned and tragic transfers of population that human history has known. In the name of religion, people of one community ruthlessly killed and maimed people of the other, and cities like Lahore, Amritsar and Kolkata became divided into ‘communal zones’. Minorities on both sides fled their homes and often secured temporary shelter in ‘refugee camps’, where they found unhelpful local administration and police in what was till recently their own country. They travelled to the other side by all sorts of means, often by foot, and were often attacked, killed or raped during the journey. Thousands of women were abducted, made to convert to the religion of the abductor and forced into marriage, and in many cases women were killed by their own family members to preserve the ‘family honour’. Many children were separated from their parents. It is estimated that Partition forced about 80 lakh people to migrate across the new border, and between five to ten lakh people were killed in partition related violence. Writers, poets and film-makers in both countries have used the survivors’ own phrase for it: a ‘division of hearts’.
Q. Describe Mahatma Gandhi’s role in the months after Independence and the circumstances of his death.
Answer: On the 15th August 1947 Gandhi did not participate in any of the independence day celebrations. He was in Kolkata in the areas torn by gruesome riots between Hindus and Muslims, saddened by the communal violence and disheartened that the principles of ahimsa, non-violence, and satyagraha, active but non-violent resistance, that he had lived and worked for had failed to bind the people in troubled times. His presence in Kolkata greatly improved the situation and independence was celebrated there in a spirit of communal harmony, but riots erupted again and he had to resort to a fast to bring peace. The next month he moved to Delhi, where large scale violence had erupted. He was deeply concerned that Muslims should be allowed to stay in India with dignity as equal citizens, and was unhappy with what he saw as the Indian government’s decision not to honour its financial commitments to Pakistan. With all this in mind he undertook his last fast in January 1948. Communal tension and violence reduced, Muslims of Delhi and surrounding areas could safely return to their homes, and the government of India agreed to give Pakistan its dues. Extremists in both communities blamed him for their conditions, and on 30 January 1948 one such extremist, Nathuram Vinayak Godse, walked up to him during his evening prayer in Delhi and fired three bullets at him, killing him instantly.
Q. How was Hyderabad integrated into the Indian Union?
Answer: Hyderabad was the largest of the Princely States and was surrounded entirely by Indian territory; some parts of the old Hyderabad state are today in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. Its ruler carried the title ‘Nizam’ and was one of the world’s richest men. He wanted an independent status for Hyderabad and entered into the Standstill Agreement with India in November 1947 for a year, while negotiations went on. Meanwhile a movement of the people of Hyderabad State against the Nizam’s rule gathered force. The peasantry in the Telangana region in particular was the victim of the Nizam’s oppressive rule and rose against him, and women who had seen the worst of this oppression joined in large numbers. Hyderabad town was the nerve centre of the movement, and the Communists and the Hyderabad Congress were in the forefront of it. The Nizam responded by unleashing a para-military force known as the Razakars, whose atrocities and communal nature knew no bounds. The central government had to order the army to tackle the situation. In September 1948 the Indian army moved in to control the Nizam’s forces, and after a few days of intermittent fighting the Nizam surrendered. This led to Hyderabad’s accession to India.
Q. How did Andhra become the first state to be created on a linguistic basis?
Answer: The decision of the national leadership to postpone linguistic states was challenged by local leaders and the people. Protests began in the Telugu speaking areas of the old Madras province, which included present day Tamil Nadu and parts of Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Karnataka. The Vishalandhra movement demanded that the Telugu speaking areas be separated from the Madras province and made into a separate Andhra province, and nearly all the political forces in the Andhra region were in favour of the linguistic reorganisation of the then Madras province. The movement gathered momentum as a result of the Central government’s vacillation. Potti Sriramulu, a Congress leader and a veteran Gandhian, went on an indefinite fast that led to his death after 56 days. This caused great unrest and resulted in violent outbursts in the Andhra region; people in large numbers took to the streets and many were injured or lost their lives in police firing, while in Madras several legislators resigned their seats in protest. Finally the Prime Minister announced the formation of a separate Andhra state in December 1952.
Q. What did the formation of linguistic states do to Indian democracy?
Answer: The linguistic states and the movements for their formation changed the nature of democratic politics and leadership in some basic ways. The path to politics and power was now open to people other than the small English speaking elite. Linguistic reorganisation also gave some uniform basis to the drawing of state boundaries. It did not lead to the disintegration of the country as many had feared earlier; on the contrary it strengthened national unity. Above all, the linguistic states underlined the acceptance of the principle of diversity: India’s adoption of democracy was a choice in favour of recognising and accepting the existence of differences which could at times be oppositional, so that democracy came to be associated with plurality of ideas and ways of life. Much of the politics in the later period was to take place within this framework.
4 6-Mark Questions
Q. ‘Freedom came with partition.’ Explain how partition was carried out and what it cost.
Answer: On 14-15 August 1947 not one but two nation-states came into existence, India and Pakistan, as a result of the division of British India. According to the two-nation theory advanced by the Muslim League, India consisted of not one but two ‘people’, Hindus and Muslims, which is why it demanded a separate country; the Congress opposed both the theory and the demand, but political developments in the 1940s, the competition between the Congress and the Muslim League, and the British role led to the decision to create Pakistan. The division followed the principle of religious majorities, and it ran into four difficulties: the two separated belts of Muslim majority areas, which produced West and East Pakistan; the Muslim majority areas that did not want Pakistan, of which the NWFP under Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan is the chapter’s example; the bifurcation of Punjab and Bengal at the district or even lower level, which was not settled by the midnight of 14-15 August; and the problem of ‘minorities’ on both sides. The cost was enormous. Violence began as soon as it became clear that the country would be partitioned and soon went out of control. Lahore, Amritsar and Kolkata became divided into ‘communal zones’. People fled to ‘refugee camps’, travelled often by foot and were attacked, killed or raped on the way; thousands of women were abducted and forced into marriage, and some were killed by their own families to preserve ‘family honour’. About 80 lakh people migrated across the new border and between five to ten lakh were killed. Beyond the administrative and financial strains, partition posed a deeper question: since the leaders of the national struggle did not believe in the two-nation theory, did partition on a religious basis make India a Hindu nation automatically? The answer the leadership gave was the secular ideal that was enshrined in the Indian Constitution: all citizens equal irrespective of their religious affiliation, with being religious or a believer no test of citizenship.
Q. Explain the problem of the Princely States and how the Government of India solved it.
Answer: British India was divided into the British Indian Provinces, directly under the control of the British government, and the Princely States, ruled by princes who enjoyed some form of control over their internal affairs as long as they accepted British supremacy, an arrangement called paramountcy or suzerainty of the British crown. The Princely States covered one-third of the land area of the British Indian Empire and one out of four Indians lived under princely rule. Just before Independence the British announced that paramountcy would lapse, which meant that all these states, as many as 565 in all, would become legally independent and were free to join India or Pakistan or remain independent, the decision being left not to the people but to the rulers. The problems started very soon: the ruler of Travancore announced that the state had decided on Independence, the Nizam of Hyderabad did the same the next day, and rulers like the Nawab of Bhopal were averse to joining the Constituent Assembly. The interim government took a firm stance against the possible division of India into small principalities. Under the Mountbatten Plan the Princely states were free to join India or Pakistan, and Sardar Patel, India’s Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister, played a historic role in negotiating with the rulers firmly but diplomatically. The task required skilful persuasion: there were 26 small states in today’s Orissa, and the Saurashtra region of Gujarat had 14 big states, 119 small states and numerous other different administrations. The government’s approach was guided by three considerations: that the people of most of the states clearly wanted to join the Indian union; that the government was prepared to be flexible in giving autonomy to some regions so as to accommodate plurality; and that after partition the integration and consolidation of the territorial boundaries of the nation had assumed supreme importance. Before 15 August 1947 peaceful negotiations had brought almost all contiguous states into the Union through the Instrument of Accession. Junagadh, Hyderabad, Kashmir and Manipur proved more difficult: Junagarh was settled after a plebiscite, Hyderabad after army action in September 1948 and the Nizam’s surrender, and Manipur after a Merger Agreement in September 1949.
Q. Trace the reorganisation of states from the Nagpur session of 1920 to the States Reorganisation Act of 1956, and describe what followed.
Answer: During colonial rule, state boundaries were drawn either on administrative convenience or simply coincided with territories annexed by the British government or ruled by the princely powers. Our national movement rejected these divisions as artificial and promised the linguistic principle as the basis of formation of states; after the Nagpur session of Congress in 1920 the principle was recognised as the basis of the reorganisation of the Congress party itself, and many Provincial Congress Committees were created by linguistic zones that did not follow the administrative divisions of British India. After Independence and partition, however, our leaders felt that carving out states on the basis of language might lead to disruption and disintegration and would draw attention away from other social and economic challenges; the fate of the Princely States was undecided and the memory of partition was fresh, so the central leadership decided to postpone matters. This was challenged by local leaders and the people. Protests began in the Telugu speaking areas of the old Madras province, and the Vishalandhra movement demanded a separate Andhra province. Potti Sriramulu, a Congress leader and veteran Gandhian, went on an indefinite fast that led to his death after 56 days, causing great unrest, violent outbursts, police firing and the resignation of several legislators in Madras. The Prime Minister announced a separate Andhra state in December 1952. The formation of Andhra spurred similar struggles elsewhere, which forced the Central Government into appointing a States Reorganisation Commission in 1953 to look into the redrawing of state boundaries. The Commission accepted that the boundaries of the state should reflect the boundaries of different languages, and on the basis of its report the States Reorganisation Act was passed in 1956, creating 14 states and six union territories. The story did not stop there: Maharashtra and Gujarat were created out of bilingual Bombay in 1960; statehood for Punjab came in 1966, when the territories of today’s Haryana and Himachal Pradesh were separated; Nagaland had become a state in 1963, Meghalaya was carved out of Assam in 1972 along with Manipur and Tripura, and Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh came into being in 1987; Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand and Jharkhand were created in 2000 on grounds of regional culture and regional imbalance rather than language; and Telangana emerged on 2 June, 2014.
Q. What reasons did Nehru use for keeping India secular? Were these reasons only ethical and sentimental, or were there prudential reasons as well?
Answer: The chapter gives Nehru’s own reasoning in his Letter to Chief Ministers of 15 October 1947. He begins from a fact rather than a sentiment: India had a Muslim minority so large in numbers that they could not, even if they wanted, go anywhere else. From this he draws the duty: whatever the provocation from Pakistan and whatever the indignities and horrors inflicted on non-Muslims there, India had to deal with this minority in a civilised manner and give them security and the rights of citizens in a democratic State. The ethical reason is plain in that sentence. Most leaders of the national movement believed that India must treat persons of all religions equally and should not be a country that gave superior status to adherents of one faith and inferior status to those who practised another; all citizens would be equal irrespective of religious affiliation, and being religious or a believer would not be a test of citizenship. This ideal of a secular nation was enshrined in the Indian Constitution. But the reasons were not only ethical. Nehru’s warning at the end of the same letter is a prudential one: if we fail to do so, we shall have a festering sore which will eventually poison the whole body politic and probably destroy it. In other words, a state that treated a tenth of its own population as second-class citizens would not survive as a stable democracy, and since the Muslim population still accounted for 10-12 per cent of the total population in 1951, the practical stakes were very large. The same question arose for every other religious minority the chapter names alongside them, the Sikhs, Christians, Jains, Buddhists, Parsis and Jews. Partition had already created severe conflict between the two communities, and there were organisations trying to organise the Hindus in order to turn India into a Hindu nation, so secularism was also the only basis on which the unity the new nation-state needed could be held together.
Q. Bring out two major differences between the challenge of nation building for the eastern and the western regions of the country at the time of Independence.
Answer: The first difference lies in what partition itself did to the two regions. In the west, Punjab was bifurcated according to the religious majority at the district or even lower level, and the areas that went to Pakistan were contiguous with the Indian side, so the western region faced a massive two-way movement of Hindus and Sikhs coming in and Muslims going out, with the deepest trauma of Partition, the killings on the roads and in the trains, and the ‘communal zones’ of Lahore and Amritsar. In the east, Bengal was bifurcated in the same way, but the territory that became East Pakistan was separated from West Pakistan by a long expanse of Indian territory, so the eastern region’s problem was of a country divided into two wings, and the chapter notes that what was ‘East’ Bengal has now become Bangladesh, which is why our Bengal is called ‘West’ Bengal. The second difference lies in what nation building then required in each. In the west the immediate task was rehabilitation on a very large scale, since lakhs of refugees arrived with no home and lived in ‘refugee camps’ for months and sometimes for years, and the integration of the princely states was a western and central problem above all, with the Saurashtra region of Gujarat alone holding 14 big states, 119 small states and numerous other administrations. In the east the pressing task was of a different kind: Gandhi’s work in Kolkata and Noakhali shows that the challenge there was to stop communal violence and to hold a mixed population together, and the north-eastern part of the eastern region raised the further question of accommodating distinct regional and tribal aspirations, which is why its reorganisation came much later, with Nagaland in 1963, Meghalaya, Manipur and Tripura in 1972, and Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh in 1987.
Q. It is said that a nation is to a large extent an ‘imagined community’ held together by common beliefs, history, political aspirations and imaginations. Identify the features that make India a nation.
Answer: India is not held together by a single language, a single religion or a single ethnic origin, so what makes it a nation has to be looked for elsewhere. Ramachandra Guha, quoted in the same set of exercises, makes the scale of that problem plain: in the history of nation-building only the Soviet experiment bears comparison with the Indian, because there too a sense of unity had to be forged between many diverse ethnic groups, religious and linguistic communities and social classes. The first feature is a shared history and a common destiny: the chapter says India chose to shape itself into a nation united by a shared history and common destiny, and the national movement is the clearest instance of it, because there were many voices in it and yet there were two goals almost everyone agreed upon, that after independence the country would be run through democratic government and that the government would be run for the good of all, particularly the poor and the socially disadvantaged groups. The second is a common political aspiration written down and agreed to: the Constitution granted fundamental rights, extended the right to vote to every citizen, adopted representative democracy based on the parliamentary form of government, laid down the principle of equality and special protection to socially disadvantaged groups and religious and cultural communities, and set out the welfare goals of democratic politics in the Directive Principles of State Policy. The third is secularism as a shared civic identity: all citizens are equal irrespective of religious affiliation, and being religious or a believer is not a test of citizenship. The fourth, and the one this chapter is really about, is the acceptance of diversity as the basis of unity rather than a threat to it. India was a land of continental size and diversity whose people spoke different languages and followed different cultures and religions, and the choice in favour of linguistic states was a choice in favour of recognising and accepting the existence of differences which could at times be oppositional. That accommodation did not lead to disintegration as many had feared; on the contrary it strengthened national unity, and it opened the path to politics and power to people other than the small English speaking elite.
5 Case Studies
(A) 1 mark Which two offices did Sardar Patel hold in the period the passage describes?
Answer: He was India’s Deputy Prime Minister and the Home Minister.
(B) 2 marks What two examples does the passage use to show how complicated the task was?
Answer: First, there were 26 small states in today’s Orissa. Second, the Saurashtra region of Gujarat had 14 big states, 119 small states and numerous other different administrations.
(C) 3 marks How does the passage describe Sardar Patel’s method, and what were the three considerations that guided the government’s approach?
Answer: The passage says he negotiated with the rulers of the princely states firmly but diplomatically, and brought most of them into the Indian Union by skilful persuasion rather than by force. The three considerations that guided the government were: that the people of most of the princely states clearly wanted to become part of the Indian union; that the government was prepared to be flexible in giving autonomy to some regions, so as to accommodate plurality and deal with the demands of the regions flexibly; and that in the backdrop of partition, which brought into focus the contest over demarcation of territory, the integration and consolidation of the territorial boundaries of the nation had assumed supreme importance.
(A) 1 mark On what assurance did the Maharaja of Manipur sign the Instrument of Accession?
Answer: On the assurance that the internal autonomy of Manipur would be maintained.
(B) 2 marks What was the split in the Legislative Assembly of Manipur, and how was it resolved?
Answer: There were sharp differences over the question of merger with India: the state Congress wanted the merger while other political parties were opposed to it. The Government of India resolved it by persuading the Maharaja into signing a Merger Agreement in September 1949.
(C) 3 marks Why is the Manipur case important both for democracy and for the debate about how the princely states were integrated?
Answer: It matters for democracy because Manipur held elections in June 1948 under the pressure of public opinion and became a constitutional monarchy, making it the first part of India to hold an election based on universal adult franchise; the extension of democratic rights to the people of a princely state is exactly what the merger was supposed to achieve. It matters for the debate because the merger itself was not settled by the elected Legislative Assembly, in which the parties were sharply divided, but by the Government of India persuading the Maharaja to sign. So the same case supports both views the NCERT exercise puts up: that the merger extended democracy to the people of the princely states, and that consent was not always the route by which it was achieved.