Modern Indian History Mixed Practice — MCQs with Answers (Set 18)

Tarabai married Rajaram around 1682, roughly two decades before he died at Sinhagad fort in 1700 and she became regent.

In her 70s, Tarabai installed a young man she presented as her grandson, Rajaram II, as the new Chhatrapati after Shahu’s 1749 death, later clashing with Peshwa Balaji Baji Rao.

By 1731, Tarabai had already reconciled with Shahu around 1730 and had no part in Kolhapur’s affairs, which by then were led by Sambhaji II.

Rajasabai installed her own biological son, Sambhaji II, as ruler at Kolhapur, deposing and imprisoning Tarabai and her son Shivaji II.

Railways were built primarily for military movement and resource extraction, serving imperial interests rather than the convenience of ordinary Indian travellers.

He had the lawn of his own official Delhi bungalow dug up and personally planted the new wheat variety there, a direct, hands-on demonstration of his confidence in the policy.

He held Steel and Heavy Industry, Finance, and Defence at the Union level, along with Food and Agriculture — but never External Affairs, across an unusually wide-ranging ministerial career.

The 1969 breakaway faction was known as Congress (Requisitionists), or Congress (R) — the ‘Congress (I)’ name only came into use after a later 1978 split, so applying it to 1969 is an anachronism.

By 1968, food-grain output had risen sharply enough that India moved away from ‘ship-to-mouth’ import dependency — the clearest early payoff, not a later 1972 harvest as sometimes claimed.

Iyothee Thass founded the Dravida Mahajana Sabha in 1891, holding its first conference in Ooty. 1898 and Madras instead mark his later Sakya Buddhist Society; 1925 and Erode is Periyar’s Self-Respect Movement; 1873 and Pune is Phule’s Satyashodhak Samaj.

Fatima Sheikh taught alongside Savitribai Phule at their Pune schools, starting in 1848. Together they opened several more schools for girls by 1851.

Narayana Guru consecrated a Shiva idol at Aruvippuram in 1888, a role usually reserved for Brahmin priests alone. He then declared “one caste, one religion, one God for mankind.”

Burma became independent on 4 January 1948, and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) followed on 4 February 1948. Indonesia and Vietnam won independence in different years (1949 and 1954); Ghana (1957) and Nigeria (1960) were also years apart; India and Pakistan became independent in 1947, not 1948.

The Non-Aligned Movement was founded at Belgrade in September 1961. Nehru, Tito, Nasser, Nkrumah, and Sukarno were its five founding leaders.

Jinnah wanted a Muslim League veto: any decision opposed by two-thirds of the Council’s Muslim members would need to be blocked. Combined with his sole-nomination demand, this would have given the League an effective lock on Muslim-related decisions.

India and Pakistan both became independent on 15 August 1947, at the partition of British India.

Mysore district specifically, not the state as a whole, had the highest recorded incidence of bonded labour in the country when his government abolished the practice.

Siddaramaiah equalled Urs’s combined 2,792-day tenure record on 6 January 2026, then surpassed it the following day, reaching 2,793 days as Karnataka’s longest-serving Chief Minister.

His land reforms transferred ownership to over 1.5 million tenants, who gained rights directly from landlords through decentralised tribunals — a shift in who held ownership, not a redistribution of a fixed acreage figure.

The Havanur Commission’s 32% figure was specifically for Backward Classes among Hindus. It recommended a separate 13% reservation for Muslims, bringing the combined figure to 45%.

He was already Mysore State’s 5th Chief Minister when the state was renamed Karnataka on 1 November 1973, mid-way through his unbroken first term. He held the title of Karnataka’s first CM continuously from that point, not just from his second term.

Indonesia awarded him the Bintang Jasa Utama for the 1947 rescue, and the Soviet Union separately awarded him the Order of Lenin, for supporting Allied forces during World War II.

The Kalinga Prize is an international award for popularising science, later entrusted to UNESCO — the only such international prize to have originated in India.

He is widely credited as one of the pilots on that airlift, though historians dispute the exact record of whose aircraft landed first.

He was secretly flying underground Quit India Movement leaders, including Jayaprakash Narayan. He remained jailed until 1946.