Read the passage and answer the following questions.

The formation of the Indian state runs in a parallel narrative with the formation of its elite. Indian independence marked the powerful role of the elite in establishing an agenda of modernisation driven by an instrumentalist notion of the state. The elite were constituted in the emerging national space of an independent India as the drivers of social change processes, bringing Indian society into modernisation. The elite not only comprised of political power brokers and private interests, but also of a middle class educated in English and employed in the private, state, and civil society sectors. The emergent professional middle class as a subject of the modern state help considerable power. With its access to primarily English-language education and opportunities for employment in both the private and public sectors. The state on on hand, developed an extended bureaucracy for running the state apparatus and on the other hand, gradually cultivated the market, creating employment opportunities for the middle classes and ensuring the participation of the middle classes in India's mixed economy.

The participation of the middle classes in the Indian economy and in the cultivation of its imagination is a salient feature that plays out in the discursive arena. The success of the Indian state in this sense was intrinsically tied to the recrafting of an imagination of an independent India that, on one hand, put forth a narrative of the nation state and on the other hand, mobilised the market as a site for participation.


1. The middle class became powerful in India because of:

(a) English-language education

(b) Modernization of the country

(c) Professionalisation of politics

(d) Popularity of power brokering


2. The passage describes:

(a) The emergence of national spaces

(b) The elitist imagination of combining nation state with market

(c) The role of bureaucracy in modernising India

(d) Social change as a limited process


3. What phenomenon marked the Indian independence?

(a) Notion of India

(b) Concept of States

(c) Role of power elites

(d) Parallel narratives of modernisation


4. The state ensured the middle class participation in:

(a) National Politics

(b) Bureaucratisation of power

(c) India's mixed economy

(d) Changing the state apparatus


5. The elites were expected to

(a) Promote private interests

(b) Set private agenda

(c) Manage the civil society

(d) Change the society



ANSWERS

1 - a

2 - b

3 - d

4 - c

5 - d