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UPSC Prelims 2025, Question 12

The concept being tested: Non-Cooperation Programme components - boycott of courts, foreign cloth, non-violence, renunciation of honours.

Consider the following subjects with regard to Non-Cooperation Programme: I. Boycott of law-courts and foreign cloth II. Observance of strict non-violence III. Retention of titles and honours without using them in public IV. Establishment of Panchayats for settling disputes How many of the above were parts of Non-Cooperation Programme?

Options

  1. AOnly one
  2. BOnly two
  3. COnly threeCorrect answer
  4. DAll the four

The answer: Only three

The Non-Cooperation Programme, launched by the Congress at its Nagpur session in December 1920 under Gandhi's leadership, combined a boycott of British institutions with constructive alternatives, all bound by strict non-violence. Statement I is correct: lawyers were called to boycott law-courts and the public to boycott foreign cloth in favour of khadi. Statement II is correct: non-violence was the non-negotiable method of the movement, a principle so central that Gandhi suspended the entire agitation after the Chauri Chaura violence of February 1922. Statement IV is correct: the programme called for village panchayats as an alternative forum for settling disputes outside British courts. Statement III is wrong: the actual instruction was surrender or renunciation of titles and honours, not their quiet retention while avoiding public use — Gandhi's own return of his Kaisar-i-Hind medal illustrates this. Three statements hold, so Only three is correct.

What UPSC was testing

The trap is built into statement III, which quietly reverses the actual instruction — renunciation of titles becomes mere non-use while retaining them — testing whether aspirants recall the precise wording of the programme rather than its general spirit. The roman-numeral, count-the-correct-statements format also blocks simple two-option elimination and forces a genuine check of each item.

How often this comes up

This concept has appeared 11 times in UPSC Prelims General Studies Paper I between 2015 and 2025 — in 2015, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2025.

The option-by-option autopsy for this question — why each of the other three is wrong, and which neighbouring concept each one was built from — is in the app.

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