Modern Indian History

The Indian National Congress was founded in 1885 by A.O. Hume, a retired British civil servant, along with prominent Indian leaders like W.C. Bonnerjee and Dadabhai Naoroji. Gandhi joined decades later and became its leader.

Wood's Dispatch (1854) was a comprehensive educational reform document that proposed establishing universities in India. This led to the creation of Universities of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras in 1857. It focused on English-medium education and Western knowledge. Other options refer to different reform efforts - Sati abolition (1829), Technical Schools came later, and Child Marriage legislation was the 1929 Act.

Banaras Hindu University (BHU) was founded in 1916 by Madan Mohan Malviya through the BHU Act. Malviya was a prominent educationist and freedom fighter who envisioned an institution combining traditional Indian learning with modern education. He raised funds extensively for this project. Rabindranath Tagore founded Visva-Bharati, Dayanand Saraswati founded DAV institutions, and Motilal Nehru was a lawyer-politician.

May 29, 1953, marks the historic first successful ascent of Mount Everest by Tenzing Norgay (an Indian citizen born in Nepal) and Edmund Hillary. This date is universally recognized in mountaineering history. Option A correctly states this significant achievement.

China attacked India in 1962, leading to the Sino-Indian War. The war lasted from October to November 1962 along the Himalayan border. This was a significant conflict between the two nations, not related to Indian independence in 1947 or other years mentioned.

The Muslim League officially passed the Lahore Resolution on March 23, 1940, demanding the creation of separate states for Muslims in northwestern and eastern India. This resolution is considered the formal demand for Pakistan's creation. The 1906 date was when the Muslim League was founded, not when partition was demanded.

The Bhoodan Movement (Land Gift Movement) was started by Acharya Vinoba Bhave in 1951. He persuaded landowners to voluntarily donate portions of their land to landless laborers as a non-violent alternative to land reform. The movement collected over 5 million acres of land across India by 1960.

'Dilli Chalo' (March to Delhi) was the slogan given by Subhash Chandra Bose in 1944 as the INA marched toward Indian soil during World War II. The phrase became a rallying cry for independence. The Congress's 1942 slogan was 'Quit India' or 'Do or Die'.

The Simon Commission (1927) had no Indian members, which was the primary source of Indian dissatisfaction. The commission was formed to review constitutional reforms but consisted entirely of British members. Indians objected to being excluded from decisions about their own political future, leading to nationwide protests with the slogan 'Simon Go Back'.

Mohammed Ali Jinnah opposed Gandhi's association with the Khilafat Movement (1919-1924) on secular grounds. He believed mixing religion with politics would harm India's long-term interests and communal harmony. Jinnah resigned from the Congress in 1920 partly due to his disagreement with Gandhi's support for the pan-Islamic Khilafat cause.

The Cripps Mission (1942) proposed dominion status after WWII with the option for provinces to secede from the union. This attempted to balance Congress's demand for a united India and the Muslim League's demand for partition. The mission failed because neither major party accepted the compromise.

The Congress ministries resigned in November 1939 because the Viceroy unilaterally declared India at war with Germany without consulting Indian leaders. This was a violation of the principle that Indian representatives should have been consulted on such a major decision. The resignation marked the end of the Congress-League cooperation that had existed since 1937.

'Man is born free, but he is found in chains everywhere' is a famous quote from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 'The Social Contract' (1762), not Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi's philosophy emphasized truth, nonviolence, and spiritual politics, but this specific statement about freedom and chains is distinctly Rousseau's Enlightenment philosophy.

The Khilafat Movement (1919-1924) was launched by Indian Muslims to protest the harsh peace terms imposed on Ottoman Turkey by the Allied Powers after WWI, particularly the Treaty of Sevres (May 1920). The movement feared the abolition of the Islamic Caliphate and the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, which held symbolic importance for Muslims worldwide.