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Business News/ Opinion / Online-views/  The Déjà View Quiz
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The Déjà View Quiz

The first ever Benegal Narsing Rau Memorial Dj View Indian history quiz

Photo: ThinkStock Premium
Photo: ThinkStock

Welcome to the first ever Benegal Narsing Rau Memorial Déjà View Indian history quiz.

Instead of boring you with assorted nuggets of amusing anecdote from the annals of world and Indian history, this week we are going to play, in the words of my late Malayali grandmother, “a kiss".

In the spirit of contemporary social media debate and discussion, and listicle journalism, I will do it in that classic quiz format: Who said this?

Below you will find a number of quotes by famous people. All you have to do is identify the speaker or writer. At the end of this column, you will find a list of answers and a scoring legend. All these quotes are accurate to the knowledge of this columnist.

Enjoy the quiz! Long live the republic! Long live the memory of Benegal Narsing Rau!

Quote 1: “I think the Gang of two (Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi) must have told him (Manmohan Singh), if you resign, the party will be hurt, the country will be hurt. And he is gullible enough to believe that. He is not what he used to be. It’s a very heavy problem. Going from big success to this situation… Right now I have a suspicion, they are all (in the Congress Party) living under a cloud cuckoo land."

Quote 2: “But ultimately—the Prime Minister (Manmohan Singh) is very smart . He doesn’t have the chutzpah of some dynamic leaders, but he’s damn good. And I have met repeatedly the Gandhi family and so on; the young man is very, you know, he is intelligent. And Sonia Gandhi obviously can’t go as far as she has unless she has some smarts about her, and I know her, too. I don’t think they are going to stand for the kind of advice which Professor Sen is giving, i.e., expanding expenditures and so forth, which really will hurt them in the elections."

Quote 3: “I am an outcaste. There are many (Antyajas or Harijans) like myself. Shall I give up my religion because of that? Many Christian friends urge me to turn Christian. I tell them there is nothing wrong with my religion. Why should I give up? Let me be outcaste. If I am pure and clean, why should I be unhappy? I have joined Antyajas and if for that reason Hindus persecute me, do I cease to be a Hindu? Hinduism is intended for me and my soul. Tell this to both the Christians and the Muslims and be firm in your own religion. Antyajas are not pawns in a game of chess so that anyone can play with them."

Quote 4: “I also pointed out that the potent cause of the spread of Islam was its simplicity and its special virtue of regarding all as equals… While I admit that men from the higher classes such as Brahmins and Kshatriyas also became Muslims, it is universally known that the bulk of converts was not drawn from among them. However, the point I want to emphasize is that no stigma attaches to Islam if the Hindus of lower castes became Muslims. On the contrary, it shows its excellence, of which the Muslims should be proud."

Quote 5: “My second mistake was that when I decided not to stand myself, I did not support Sardar Patel. We differed on many issues but I am convinced that if he had succeeded me as Congress president he would have seen that the Cabinet Mission Plan was successfully implemented. He would have never committed the mistake of Jawaharlal Nehru which gave Mr Jinnah the opportunity of sabotaging the plan. I can never forgive myself when I think that if I had not committed these mistakes, perhaps the history of the last ten years would have been different."

Quote 6: “When Lord Mountbatten suggested that partition might offer a solution to the present difficult, he found ready acceptance to the idea in Sardar Patel’s mind. In fact, Sardar Patel was fifty per cent in favour of partition even before Lord Mountbatten appeared on the scene…It would not perhaps be unfair to say that Vallabhbhai Patel was the founder of Indian partition."

Bonus Quote 7: When asked what he thought of Western civilization who said: “I think it would be a good idea."?

Answers: 1. Jagdish Bhagwati in a January interview to The Economic Times 2. Jagdish Bhagwati in a 2013 appearance on the Econtalk podcast 3. M.K. Gandhi at a Harijan conference in 1925 asking Harijans to stay Hindu 4. M.K. Gandhi at a speech in Johannesburg in 1905 commending Islam for its outreach to the lower castes 5. Abul Kalam Azad in the 1988 edition of his book India Wins Freedom 6. Abul Kalam Azad, some pages later in the very same book 7. Nobody knows. There is no contemporary record of Gandhi actually having said this most amusing quip.

Scoring guide: Give yourself a point for each right answer. Any score of four points or higher is excellent. In addition give yourself another million bonus points if you god promise to never again slyly cherry-pick writings or sayings by famous people, especially dead ones, to make a convenient point in your op-eds, editorials, blogposts or tweets.

Every week, Déjà View scours historical research and archives to make sense of current news and affairs.

Comment at views@livemint.com. To read Sidin Vadukut’s previous columns, go to www.livemint.com/dejaview

Follow Mint Opinion on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Mint_Opinion

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Published: 17 Apr 2015, 03:14 PM IST
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