PASSAGE-10

Sixty years ago, on the evening of August 14, 1947, a few hours before Britain’s Indian Empire was formally divided into the nation-states of India and Pakistan, Lord Louis Mountbatten and his wife, Edwina, sat down in the viceregal mansion in New Delhi to watch the latest Bob Hope movie, “My Favorite Brunette.” Large parts of the subcontinent were descending into chaos, as the implications of partitioning the Indian Empire along religious lines became clear to the millions of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs caught on the wrong side of the border. In the next few months, some twelve million people would be uprooted and as many as a million murdered. But on that night in mid-August the bloodbath—and the fuller consequences of hasty imperial retreat—still lay in the future, and the Mountbattens probably felt they had earned their evening’s entertainment.
Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India, had arrived in New Delhi in March, 1947, charged with an almost impossible task. Irrevocably enfeebled by the Second World War, the British belatedly realized that they had to leave the subcontinent, which had spiralled out of their control through the nineteen-forties. But plans for brisk disengagement ignored messy realities on the ground. Mountbatten had a clear remit to transfer power to the Indians within fifteen months. Leaving India to God, or anarchy, as Mohandas Gandhi, the foremost Indian leader, exhorted, wasn’t a political option, however tempting. Mountbatten had to work hard to figure out how and to whom power was to be transferred.
The dominant political party, the Congress Party, took inspiration from Gandhi in claiming to be a secular organization, representing all four hundred million Indians. But many Muslim politicians saw it as a party of upper-caste Hindus and demanded a separate homeland for their hundred million co-religionists, who were intermingled with non-Muslim populations across the subcontinent’s villages, towns, and cities. Eventually, as in Palestine, the British saw partition along religious lines as the quickest way to the exit.
But sectarian riots in Punjab and Bengal dimmed hopes for a quick and dignified British withdrawal, and boded ill for India’s assumption of power. Not surprisingly, there were some notable absences at the Independence Day celebrations in New Delhi on August 15th. Gandhi, denouncing freedom from imperial rule as a “wooden loaf,” had remained in Calcutta, trying, with the force of his moral authority, to stop Hindus and Muslims from killing each other. His great rival Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who had fought bitterly for a separate homeland for Indian Muslims, was in Karachi, trying to hold together the precarious nation-state of Pakistan.
Nevertheless, the significance of the occasion was not lost on many. While the Mountbattens were sitting down to their Bob Hope movie, India’s constituent assembly was convening in New Delhi. The moment demanded grandiloquence, and Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi’s closest disciple and soon to be India’s first Prime Minister, provided it. “Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny,” he said. “At the stroke of the midnight hour, while the world sleeps, India will awaken to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.”
Posterity has enshrined this speech, as Nehru clearly intended. But today his quaint phrase “tryst with destiny” resonates ominously, so enduring have been the political and psychological scars of partition. The souls of the two new nation-states immediately found utterance in brutal enmity. In Punjab, armed vigilante groups, organized along religious lines and incited by local politicians, murdered countless people, abducting and raping thousands of women. Soon, India and Pakistan were fighting a war—the first of three—over the disputed territory of Kashmir. Gandhi, reduced to despair by the seemingly endless cycle of retaliatory mass murders and displacement, was shot dead in January, 1948, by a Hindu extremist who believed that the father of the Indian nation was too soft on Muslims. Jinnah, racked with tuberculosis and overwork, died a few months later, his dream of a secular Pakistan apparently buried with him.
Many of the seeds of postcolonial disorder in South Asia were sown much earlier, in two centuries of direct and indirect British rule, but, as book after book has demonstrated, nothing in the complex tragedy of partition was inevitable. In “Indian Summer” (Henry Holt; $30), Alex von Tunzelmann pays particular attention to how negotiations were shaped by an interplay of personalities. Von Tunzelmann goes on a bit too much about the Mountbattens’ open marriage and their connections to various British royals, toffs, and fops, but her account, unlike those of some of her fellow British historians, isn’t filtered by nostalgia. She summarizes bluntly the economic record of the British overlords, who, though never as rapacious and destructive as the Belgians in the Congo, damaged agriculture and retarded industrial growth in India through a blind faith in the “invisible hand” that supposedly regulated markets. Von Tunzelmann echoes Edmund Burke’s denunciation of the East India Company when she terms the empire’s corporate forerunner a “beast” whose “only object was money”; and she reminds readers that, in 1877, the year that Queen Victoria officially became Empress of India, a famine in the south killed five million people even as the Queen’s viceroy remained adamant that famine relief was a misguided policy.
Politically, too, British rule in India was deeply conservative, limiting Indian access to higher education, industry, and the civil service. Writing in the New York Tribune in the mid-nineteenth century, Karl Marx predicted that British colonials would prove to be the “unconscious tool” of a “social revolution” in a subcontinent stagnating under “Oriental despotism.” As it turned out, the British, while restricting an educated middle class, empowered a multitude of petty Oriental despots. (In 1947, there were five hundred and sixty-five of these feudatories, often called maharajas, running states as large as Belgium and as small as Central Park.) 

1.     From the passage, what can we conclude about the view of the author about Lord Mountbatten?

Option 1 : Appreciative    Option 2 : Sarcastic           Option 3 : Neutral  Option 4 : Speculative

2.     What is the author likely to agree to as the reason for the chaos in the sub-continent in 1947?

Option 1 : Because Gandhi was assassinated

Option 2 : Because the British left the sub-continent in haste.

Option 3 : Because the Hindus and Muslims could not live in peace.

Option 4 : Because Lord Mountbatten was watching a movie on 14th August 1947.

3.     What could possibly "grandiloquence" mean as inferred from the context in which it has been used in the passage?

Option 1 : Grand Party     Option 2 : Celebrations    Option 3 : Lofty speech    Option 4 : Destiny

4.     What is the author primarily talking about in the article?

Option 1 : Mountbatten's association with India.     Option 2 : Nehru's speech

Option 3 : Gandhi's assassination          Option 4 : The aftermath of the partition.

5.     In the view of the author, What does the Nehru's phrase "tryst with destiny" symbolise today?

Option 1 : A celebration of Indian Independence     Option 2 : An inspirational quote

Option 3 : A reminder of Gandhi's assassination      4 : A symbol of the ills of the partition

6.     The author persists on talking about the " Bob Hope movie" in the article. Why?

Option 1 : Because the movie was a classic of 1947

Option 2 : He thinks it caused the partition of the sub-continent.

Option 3 : He uses it to show the apathy of the Britishers towards the sub-continent

Option 4 : It was Mountbatten's favourite movie.

7.     What does the author imply about the future of the Pakistan?

Option 1 : It becomes a secular country.        Option 2 : It becomes unsecular.

Option 3 : It is unprosperous.                 Option 4 : It becomes a rogue state.

8.     Why was Gandhi assassinated?

Option 1 : Because he was favouring the Muslims.

Option 2 : His assassin thought he was partial to the Muslims.

Option 3 : He got killed in the violence after partition.                   Option 4 : None of these

PASSAGE-1

The impressive recent growth of certain sectors of the Indian economy is a necessary but insufficient condition for the elimination of extreme poverty.

In order to ensure that the poorest benefit from this growth, and also contribute to it, the expansion and improvement of the microfinance sector should be a national priority. Studies suggest that the impact of microfinance on the poorest is greater than on the poor, and yet another that non-participating members of communities where microfinance operates experience socio-economic gains — suggesting strong spillover effects. Moreover, well-managed microfinance institutions (MFIs) have shown a capacity to wean themselves off of subsidies and become sustainable within a few years.

Microfinance is powerful, but it is clearly no panacea. Microfinance does not directly address some structural problems facing Indian society and the economy, and it is not yet as efficient as it will be when economies of scale are realized and a more supportive policy environment is created.

Loan products are still too inflexible, and savings and insurance services that the poor also need are not widely available due to regulatory barriers.

Still, microfinance is one of the few market-based, scalable anti-poverty solutions that is in place in India today, and the argument to scale it up to meet the overwhelming need is compelling. According to Sa-Dhan, the overall outreach is 6.5 million families and the sector-wide loan portfolio is Rs 2,500 crore.

However, this is meeting only 10% of the estimated demand. Importantly, new initiatives are expanding this success story to the some of the country's poorest regions, such as eastern and central Uttar Pradesh.

The local and national governments have an important role to play in ensuring the growth and improvement of microfinance. First and foremost, the market should be left to set interest rates, not the state. Ensuring transparency and full disclosure of rates including fees is something the government should ensure, and something that new technologies as well as reporting and data standards are already enabling.

Furthermore, government regulators should set clear criteria for allowing MFIs to mobilize savings for on-lending to the poor; this would allow for a large measure of financial independence amongst well-managed MFIs. Each Indian state could consider forming a multi-party working group to meet with microfinance leaders and have a dialogue with them about how the policy environment could be made more supportive and to clear up misperceptions.
There is an opportunity to make a real dent in hard-core poverty through microfinance. By unleashing the entrepreneurial talent of the poor, we will slowly but surely transform India in ways we can only begin to imagine today.

Questions

1.     What could be the meaning of the word panacea in the passage?

Solution                    Problem                    Solution to all problems               Sustainable solution

2.     Why, according to the author, should microfinance be scaled up in India?

a. The demand for microfinance is high.  b. It is a market-based anti-poverty solution.

c. It is sustainable.   D. Both 1 and 2.       E.  : 1, 2 and 3.

3.     Why are saving products not available?

a. Due to inflexibility of loan products.           B. Due to regulatory restrictions.

c. Since insurance services are not available. D. Saving products are not available.

4.     Why does the author talk about the 'entrepreneurial talent of poor' in the concluding paragraph?

a. Entrepreneurship among poor is encouraged by microfinance.

b. Entrepreneurship among poor is an alternate to microfinance.

c. Entrepreneurship among poor is discouraged by microfinance.                     D. None of these

5.     Which of the following is not a challenge faced by microfinance in India?

a. Does not help the poorest.                             B.Efficient when economy of scale is achieved.

c. Non-conducive policy environment.            D. Structural problems of Indian society.

6.     Which of the following is correct with regard to microfinance?

a. The supply is more than demand.                            B. The demand is more than supply.

c. The supply and demand are well balanced.  d.None of these can be inferred from  passage.

7.     What is the author's view about interest rates?

a. The government should set them.    B.There should be transparency with regard to them.

c. The market forces should set them.   D. Both 1 and 2.    E. Both 2 and 3.

8.     Which of the following will the author agree to?

a. Indian economy growth will solve the problem of poverty.

B. Indian economy growth is not enough to solve the problem of poverty.

C. Indian economy growth aggravates the problem of poverty.             D. None of these