Important Treaties and Agreements: India and the World

The correct answer is A, Bengal, Bihar and Odisha. The Treaty of Allahabad was signed in 1765 by Robert Clive with the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II and Shuja-ud-Daula of Awadh after the Company's victory at the Battle of Buxar in 1764. By it the emperor granted the Company the diwani, that is the right to collect the revenue, of Bengal, Bihar and Odisha, which made the Company the real ruler of eastern India while the Nawab kept only the nizamat or police and judicial duties. Option B is wrong because Awadh and Rohilkhand were not ceded; Awadh was restored to Shuja-ud-Daula on payment of an indemnity and was kept as a buffer state. Option C is wrong because Awadh again does not belong in the list. Option D is wrong for the same reason, and because Odisha is the third province that completes the grant.

The correct answer is B, the First Anglo-Maratha War. The Treaty of Salbai of 1782 closed the First Anglo-Maratha War, which had begun with the Company's attempt to place Raghunath Rao in power at Pune. The treaty restored the position as it stood before the war, recognised Madhav Rao II as the Peshwa and gave the Company about twenty years of peace with the Marathas, which it used against Mysore. Option A is wrong because the Second Anglo-Mysore War was ended by the Treaty of Mangalore in 1784, signed with Tipu Sultan. Option C is wrong because the Second Anglo-Maratha War followed the Treaty of Bassein of 1802 and ended with separate treaties at Deogaon and Surji-Arjungaon in 1803 and 1804. Option D is wrong because the First Anglo-Sikh War ended with the Treaty of Lahore in 1846.

The correct answer is C, the Treaty of Bassein. Signed in 1802, it bound Peshwa Baji Rao II to Lord Wellesley's subsidiary alliance after his defeat by the Holkars at Poona. The Peshwa accepted a Company force in his territory at his own cost and gave up the right to deal with any other power, which the other Maratha chiefs treated as a surrender of Maratha independence and which led directly to the Second Anglo-Maratha War. Option A is wrong because the Treaty of Purandar of 1776 was an agreement between the Company and the Marathas that set aside the earlier Treaty of Surat. Option B is wrong because Salbai of 1782 only ended the first war between them. Option D is wrong because the Treaty of Amritsar was signed with Ranjit Singh in 1809 and fixed the Sutlej as the limit of Sikh expansion.

The correct answer is B, the Ravi, the Beas and the Sutlej. The Indus Waters Treaty was signed at Karachi in 1960 by Jawaharlal Nehru and President Ayub Khan, with the World Bank as the third party to the agreement. It divided the six rivers of the Indus system: the three eastern rivers, the Ravi, the Beas and the Sutlej, were allotted to India, and the three western rivers, the Indus, the Chenab and the Jhelum, to Pakistan, with India allowed limited non-consumptive, domestic and run-of-the-river use of the western rivers. Options A, C and D are wrong because each mixes the two groups: A names exactly the three western rivers that went to Pakistan, while C and D each place one western river, the Chenab and the Jhelum respectively, in India's share.

The correct answer is C, the Soviet Union. The Tashkent Declaration was signed in January 1966 by Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri and President Ayub Khan at Tashkent, then in the Soviet Union and now the capital of Uzbekistan, with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin as mediator. Both sides agreed to withdraw their forces to the positions held before the 1965 war and to restore diplomatic relations. Shastri died in Tashkent the same night the declaration was signed. Option A is wrong because the United States did not mediate this settlement, although it later hosted the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel. Option B is wrong because Britain played no mediating role here. Option D is wrong because Egypt, though a close non-aligned partner of India, was not a party to the talks.

The correct answer is B, Indira Gandhi and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The Shimla Agreement was signed in July 1972, after the war of 1971 and the creation of Bangladesh. Its central provisions were that the ceasefire line in Jammu and Kashmir would be respected as the Line of Control and that India and Pakistan would settle their differences bilaterally and by peaceful means, without third-party involvement. Option A is wrong because Ayub Khan had left office by 1969; his agreement with India was the Tashkent Declaration of 1966. Option C is wrong because Lal Bahadur Shastri died in January 1966. Option D is wrong because Vajpayee and Nawaz Sharif signed the Lahore Declaration in 1999, after the Delhi-Lahore bus service was started. A further point worth remembering is that the agreement was signed at Shimla in July 1972 and that the exchange of territory and the return of prisoners of war taken in 1971 followed from it, which is why the Shimla Agreement and the Tashkent Declaration are so often set against each other in a single question.

The correct answer is C, the Maastricht Treaty. Signed in 1992 in the Dutch city of Maastricht and in force from 1993, it created the European Union, introduced the idea of European citizenship and set out the path to the single currency. Option A is wrong because the Treaty of Rome of 1957 created the earlier European Economic Community, the common market of six states that grew into the Union. Option B is wrong because the Treaty of Lisbon, signed in 2007, only amended the existing treaties and reformed the Union's institutions; it did not create it. Option D is wrong because the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 was the peace settlement that ended the First World War with Germany and has nothing to do with European integration.

The correct answer is B, Spain and Portugal. The Treaty of Tordesillas was signed in 1494, two years after Columbus reached the Americas, and drew an imaginary line down the Atlantic: lands found to the west of it were to belong to Spain and those to the east to Portugal. The line is the reason Brazil became Portuguese while the rest of South America became Spanish, and the reason Portugal held the sea route to India that Vasco da Gama opened in 1498. Option A is wrong because Britain and France were not yet maritime powers in 1494 and settled their colonial contest much later, by the Treaty of Paris of 1763. Option C is wrong because Dutch sea power belongs to the seventeenth century. Option D is wrong because France had no part in this papal arbitration.

The correct answer is A, wetlands. The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance was signed in 1971 at Ramsar, a city on the Caspian coast of Iran, and is the oldest of the modern global environmental treaties. States that join it list their important wetlands as Ramsar sites and undertake to use them wisely; India is a party and has designated many such sites. Option B is wrong because no single global treaty is devoted to tropical forests; forests are dealt with under the climate and biodiversity conventions. Option C is wrong because coral reefs are covered as part of marine ecosystems under the Law of the Sea and the biodiversity convention. Option D is wrong because mangroves are only one kind of wetland, and the convention covers lakes, rivers, marshes, estuaries and man-made wetlands as well.

The correct answer is C, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. India has not signed the test-ban treaty of 1996, just as it is not a party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968, holding that both divide the world permanently into nuclear and non-nuclear states. India has instead declared a voluntary moratorium on further nuclear testing. Option A is wrong because India acceded to the Antarctic Treaty and runs research stations on the continent. Option B is wrong because India is an original party to the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993 and a member of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons set up under it. Option D is wrong because India is also a party to the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972, which bans the development and stockpiling of biological agents as weapons.

The correct answer is B, the Vienna Convention. The Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer was adopted in 1985 as a framework agreement, and the Montreal Protocol of 1987 gave it teeth by fixing timetables for phasing out ozone-depleting substances such as chlorofluorocarbons and halons. The Kigali Amendment of 2016 brought hydrofluorocarbons, which harm the climate rather than the ozone layer, under the same protocol. Option A is wrong because the Basel Convention of 1989 deals with the transboundary movement of hazardous waste. Option C is wrong because the Stockholm Convention of 2001 deals with persistent organic pollutants such as DDT. Option D is wrong because the biodiversity convention of 1992 produced the Cartagena and Nagoya Protocols, not Montreal. A simple way to keep the pair in mind is that Vienna is the framework and Montreal the schedule, and that the protocol is the one global environmental agreement every member state of the United Nations has joined.