Direction (Qs.1 to 10): Read the passage carefully and answer the questions given below it. There are some blanks given in the passage based on which some questions are framed, and some words are highlighted as well to help you answer some of the questions.

After the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) was passed by Parliament three weeks ago, opponents of the _____ (A) statute took to the streets. (B) States shutdowns (a) with internet responded (b), bans on protest meetings, indiscriminate (c) baton charges, assaults inside educational institutions, unprovoked (d) arrests, and the use of live ammunition. Supporters of the CAA call these measures appropriate responses to violent agitators targeting public infrastructure. Images of vandalized vehicles, played on loop on a number of news channels, have turned the burning bus into a fetish within pro-CAA circles. (C) The celebrated actor Kangana Ranaut, an avid admirer of Prime Minister Narendra Modi,/ tarred all critic of the amended law with the same brush when she said,/ “In our population, only 3-4% people pay tax, /while others are dependent on that tax./ So, what gives you the right to burn buses, trains and to create ruckus in the country?” While Ranaut was castigated for her _____ (D) understanding of tax revenues, the sentiment she expressed is widely shared. Karnataka’s advocate general Prabhuling Navadgi argued before a bench of Chief Justice Abhay Oka and Justice Pradeep Yerur that curtailing the fundamental right to peaceful assembly by pre-emptively activating Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code was justified because “the final concern of the state is safety of public property”. (E) This is a deeply misguided (a) attitude. While no destructing (b) of property should be disregarded (c), the highest duty of any government is securing the lives and liberties (d) of citizens. The state has a monopoly on legitimate violence in modern democracies. An important measure of a nation’s freedom is the extent to which that monopoly is used in the service of citizens’ rights rather than as a tool of oppression. Admittedly, calibrating a response to agitations is a challenge. (F) Dealing harshly with peaceful protest signals a tendency towards authoritarianism, _____. How, then, are we to judge the veracity of competing narratives about the anti-CAA protests? More specifically, how should we view the government’s role in Uttar Pradesh, where a disproportionate number of deaths has taken place, 20 at last count? Was Zahir Ahmed quietly smoking a beedi near his home in Meerut when gunned down, or was he part of a rabid mob? Was Anas Hussain of Nehtaur hit in the eye by a rioter’s bullet as he stepped out to buy milk for his seven-month-old son, or was it police firing that took his life? Was the constable who shot the studious IAS aspirant Mohammed Suleiman in the chest at point-blank range acting in self defence or in cold blood? Was the lathi charge warranted that turned a Varanasi demonstration into a stampede which crushed 11-year-old Saghir Ahmed to death? (G) The police maintain (a) that all crossfire (b) in UP were caused by fatalities (c) between security forces and agitators (d) carrying weapons of their own. In support of this account, there is at least one video showing a civilian brandishing a revolver during a march. (H) However, the lack of casualties on the police side is striking,/ as is the fact that no gun /has been recovered from any of the people /supposedly killed in armed confrontations. (I) The police version sounds a lot like official accounts of extrajudicial killings, _____. Looking at the country as a whole, it is worth considering whether apprehensions of violence became self-fulfilling prophecies in areas where Section 144 was enforced as a deterrent. If an administration criminalizes all public meetings, it is obliged to crack down on contraventions of the order. (J) Since radical (a) activists and hoodlums (b) are predisposed to defy bans while ordinary citizens are situation (c) to comply with them, any use of force on the part of the police is likely to be met with fierce retaliation in such a inclined (d). The idea that some administrations provoked retaliatory violence is bolstered by the conspicuous difference between rallies held in states which prohibited protests, most of them BJP ruled, and those like Maharashtra and Telangana, which did not restrict free assembly. I went to a meeting at Mumbai’s August Kranti Maidan on 19 December which was so jam-packed that any aggressive act by law enforcement could have led to disaster. Instead, the police were at their friendliest, politely directing the throngs to the correct entry and exit points and even providing a supply of drinking water. At the end of the evening, there were no burnt buses and certainly no dead bystanders, only a wonderful sense of comradeship among a diverse group of dissenters that included many youngsters transferring their activism for the first time from social media to a physical venue.