📚 Practice Mode

The author is most likely to disagree with the statement that

1. the common people were always extremely interested in governance
2. the agricultural workers have no “off season” as such
3. the caste divide exacerbated the sufferings of the poor and the deprived

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question that follows.

PASSAGE – I

The Voice had to be listened to not only on account of its form but the matter for which it delivered. It gave a message to the country that it needed greatly. It brought to the common people a realization of their duty to concern themselves with their affairs. The common people were made to take an interest in the manner in which they were governed, in the taxes they paid, in the return they got from those taxes. This interest in public affairs – politics as you may call it – was to be the concern no longer of the highly educated few but of the many – the poor, the property-less, the working men in town and country. Politics was not to be the concern of a small aristocracy of intellectuals. And with the change in the subjects of politics that Voice brought about also a change in the objects of politics. Till then politics had busied itself mainly with the machinery of Government – towards making its personnel more and more native, with proposals for a better distribution of political power, with protests against the sins of omission and of commission of the administration. This Voice switched politics on to concern for the needs of the common people. The improvement of the lot of the poor was to be the main concern of politics and the politician. The improvement, especially of the lives of the people of the neglected villages, was to be placed before Governments and political organizations as the goal of all political endeavour. The raising of the standard of living of the people of the villages, the finding of subsidiary occupations which would give the agricultural poor work for their enforced leisure during the off season and in addition to their exiguous income, the improvement of housing of the poor, the sanitation of the villages – these were to be the objectives to be kept in view. In the towns the slums were to receive special attention. There was especially a class of the poor for which that compassionate Voice pleaded and protested. This was for the so-called depressed class, the outcastes of Hindu society. The denial of elementary human rights to this class of people it considered the greatest blot on Hindu society and history. It raised itself in passionate protest against the age-old wrongs of this class and forced those that listened to it to endeavour to remove the most outrageous of them like untouchability. It caused a revolution in Hindu religious practice by having Hindu temples thrown open to these people. It made the care of them a religious duty of the Hindus by re-naming them Harijans.