CMAT 2018 Slot 2 Question Paper
Read the passage carefully and answer the question that follows.
Passage I
All of us play but we are not athletes. We are homo ludens (Latin for play) and our playfulness is unproductive. But athletes play for profit and contest for prizes. It is the transformation of our play and games into athletics that leads to medals. What makes Haryana such a fine place for athletics in India? With barely 2% of India's population, people from Haryana won around 40% of the gold medals in the recently concluded CWG 2010.
People in Haryana tend to count the gold medals of the Hyderabadi shuttler, Saina Nehwal and the
Delhi wrestler, Sushil Kumar, in their tally. This is because both of them are Jats. People of this dominant caste form more than 20% of Haryana's population and, therefore, in popular perception, Haryana is Jat-land. All sports are oriented towards the Olympic slogan 'higher, faster, and strongerā. But the ones in which Haryana got medals stand for plain force and aggression like wrestling, boxing and shooting. Anthropologists call them contact sports because the opponents have bodily contact in them. Shooting is a combative sport because opponents use a combat weapon. Such sports are a substitute of war or training for it.
Haryana is India's pride in contact and combative games. I can think of t hree reasons for it, viz.
historical geography, peasant culture of perseverance and a feeble government policy. Firstly, the province has
a volatile history of continuous aggression due to its geographical location on the frontier. Secondly, the people of Haryana have valued physical strength and perseverance due to its peasant culture. Thirdly, the sports policy since 2006 has honed the killer athletic spirit in Haryana. The half-hearted policy does not create achievers but supports the successful ones among them. Punjab was divided on religious lines in 1947. The non-Sikh majority parts of this truncated Punjab were constituted as Haryana in 1966. Like a horseshoe, Haryana encircles Delhi from three sides and the culture of both is similar. At the popular level, people are rough and tough - meaning 'rough by tongue and tough in body'. In the medieval times, Haryana flourished when weak rulers ruled Delhi.
Most of the area remained under Delhi's tutelage but small principalities also dotted the arid
landscape of Haryana. Mostly, people of the region joined the Mughals and Marathas in repulsing invaders. But
the same locals did not mind plundering Delhi or looting the retreating armies sometimes. The British
colonialists expanded from the east. They conquered most of India with the help of soldiers from western UP
and Bihar. But, in the late 19th century, the colonial strategists honored ordinary peasant castes by calling them 'martial races' in united Punjab. This was a clever way of taming the aggression in this frontier region.
This smart move was also to recruit rural Punjabis in the colonial army so that they could be used
to thwart the southward expansion of Tsarist Russia. There is a family resemblance between military/hunting
activities and wrestling, shooting, races, riding or archery. For the military serving population of Haryana,
therefore, such sports come easily. Secondly, before the advent of machinery, agriculture was a backbreaking
occupation. The size of agricultural income had a direct relation with the quantity of sweat produced during
one's toil.
Why do people of Haryana tend to count the medals bagged by Saina Nehwal in the tally of their own state, though she is a Hyderabadi?
Read the passage carefully and answer the question that follows.
Passage II
Putting a final lid on the Planning era, the Niti Aayog is gearing up to launch the three-year action plan
from April 1 after the end of 12th Five Year Plan on March 31.
Under the new system, sources said states will be enc ouraged to meet the targets of various schemes or
face the prospects of drying up of the fund flows.
āThe 12th five years plan is coming to an e nd on March 31. The three-year action plan to be unveiled this
month will come in force from April 1, which will also end the prevailing system of the centre patiently waiting (for) the state governments to implement the schemes.
āNow, you either meet the target or you will fa ce the prospects of the fund flow drying up,ā a senior
Niti Aayog official said.
The official said ,āWe have patiently waited for the state governments to adopt a number of reform oriented legislative bills. But our experiences have largely been negative... therefore, the reform agenda arrived
at after consensus will need to be adopted by them, and the states doing so will get incentivesā.
Niti Aayog has also been entrusted the work on the 15-year Vision Document and a seve n year
strategy, which would guide the governmentās development works till 2030.
As compared to the previous Five Year Plans, the new NITI Aayog's stance towards the states is:
Read the passage carefully and answer the question that follows.
Passage III
Twenty years ago on Thursday, Moscow started what it thought would be a "blitzkrieg" against
secular separatists in Chechnya, a tiny, oil-rich province in Russia's North Caucasus region that had declared its independence.
But the first Chechen war became Russia's Vietnam; the second war was declared a victory only in
2009. The two conflicts have reshaped Russia, Chechnya, their rulers - and those who oppose them. In 1994, shortly after Moscow invaded Chechnya in an effort to restore its territorial integrity, Akhmad Kadyrov, a bearded, barrel-chested Muslim scholar turned guerrilla commander, declared jihad on all Russians and said each Chechen should kill at least 150 of them.
That was the proportion of the populations on each side of the conflict: some 150 million Russians
and less than a million Chechens in a small, landlocked province, which the separatists wanted to carve out of Russia. Western media and politicians dubbed the Chechens "freedom fighters" - an army of Davids fighting the Russian Goliath.
Moscow was lambasted internationally for disproportionate use of force and rolling back on the
democratic freedoms that former leader Boris Yeltsin was so eager to introduce after the 1991 Soviet Union collapse. Tens of thousands died amid atrocities committed by both sides - and many more were displaced before 1996, when the Russians retreated, leaving Chechnya essentially independent. Retreating was a humiliation for Russia's military machine that less than a decade earlier had presented a seemingly formidable threat to the entire Western world.
