The sympathy of Indian soldiers in uniform with the released I.N.A. prisoners…

Concept — In a comprehension passage, an inference question asks what a reported detail signifies, not what it literally records. A supportable inference is one the passage's own accumulated evidence licenses: it must follow from what the writer has actually established, and it must not import a motive, a character trait or a judgement that the text never supplies. The method, therefore, is to identify the theme the passage has been building and then read the detail as the point at which that theme is carried one step further.

Application — Across its whole length this passage builds a single theme: the sympathy generated by the I.N.A. trials was national in scale and crossed communal lines. A Hindu, a Muslim and a Sikh were put on the dock together; Bhulabhai Desai, Tej Bahadur Sapru and Nehru appeared for the defence and the Muslim League joined the countrywide protest; the Intelligence Bureau itself recorded that this particular brand of sympathy cuts across communal barriers; and a journalist found among the Red Fort prisoners not the slightest feeling of Hindu and Muslim. The Lahore detail is the closing step in that sequence — men still wearing the uniform of the British Indian Army openly identifying with men who had taken up arms against it. A feeling strong enough to override both service loyalty and community identity is precisely the feeling the passage has been describing: national sentiment joined to a sense of brotherhood.

Contrast — the other readings measured against the same text:

• Rebellious nature of Indian soldiers — the passage records that the British became extremely nervous about the I.N.A. spirit spreading to the Indian Army. That sentence reports an official anxiety about what might follow; the text describes no act of insubordination at the reception and nowhere characterises the soldiers' nature.

• Simply to participate in the reception party — the word simply drains the act of significance. Yet the attendance was weighty enough for the Punjab Governor to report it to government, and the men came in uniform, which is what turned a welcome function into a political fact.

• None of these — this reading can stand only if no offered interpretation fits the passage, whereas the cross-communal and cross-service evidence assembled above supports the reading 'Feeling of Nationalism and Fraternity' directly.

Cross-check — read the passage's own frame back onto the detail. Penderel Moon called these months 'The Edge of a Volcano', and the writer's argument is that mass national pressure, not any isolated mutinous act, produced the decisive shift in British policy. The Lahore reception fits that argument exactly, as evidence of national feeling and fraternity reaching into the army itself.

The sympathy shown by Indian soldiers in uniform towards the released I.N.A. prisoners at Lahore therefore indicates a feeling of nationalism and fraternity.