Consider the statements (A) and (B) about Paramountcy and choose the correct…

Concept

The Doctrine of Paramountcy was the British colonial principle that East India Company (and later Crown) authority was paramount — that is, supreme over every Indian princely state. Under this doctrine, the British treated protection of their own political and economic interests as sufficient justification to intervene directly in a kingdom's affairs, including annexing it outright or threatening annexation.

Application

Statement (A) claims the Company held that its own authority was NOT supreme. This is the reverse of what paramountcy actually asserted — the doctrine's entire premise was a claim of supreme, overriding Company authority over Indian states. So statement (A) does not match the historical claim and is false.

Statement (B) states the Company considered itself justified in annexing, or threatening to annex, a kingdom to protect its own interests. This matches how paramountcy operated in practice — administrative annexations such as those under the Doctrine of Lapse (e.g., Satara, Jhansi, Nagpur) and the 1856 annexation of Awadh were episodes where the Company expanded control on the strength of its claimed paramount authority, with protecting Company interests as an underlying motive even where the formal grounds cited (such as lapse of succession or alleged misgovernment) varied case by case. So statement (B) is true.

Cross-check

A further check: contemporary British justifications for annexation during this period typically invoked the Company's own paramount status rather than a denial of its authority, and many such annexations — including under the Doctrine of Lapse — were driven by stated Company interests rather than external attack, reinforcing that (A) is false and (B) is true.

Why the other combinations fail

• Treating the Company's stance as a claim of non-supremacy does not fit the doctrine, whose entire basis was a claim of supreme authority.

• Treating the annexation clause as an overstatement ignores repeated, openly justified interventions like the Doctrine of Lapse annexations.

• Combining a claim of non-supremacy with a denial of the annexation practice inverts both parts of the historical record at once.

Since (A) is false and (B) is true, the combination describing exactly that pairing is correct.