A full descriptive mock for CAPF Paper II: Part A essay prompts with one model essay, a Part B comprehension passage with model answers, and a precis exercise with a model precis
Authored mock for this wiki, not a verbatim previous-year paper. CAPF Paper II is descriptive, carries 200 marks, and runs for three hours. Part A (Essay) is 80 marks and may be written in English or Hindi. Part B (Comprehension, precis and other communication skills) is 120 marks and must be answered in English only.
How to use this paper: sit it in one unbroken three-hour block, by hand, with no notes. Attempt the essay first while you are fresh, then the comprehension, then the precis. Mark yourself afterwards with evaluation rubric and log your score. For the craft behind each section see how to write the capf essay, comprehension technique, and precis writing.
Suggested time split: Essay about 40 minutes, Comprehension about 60 minutes, Precis about 40 minutes, with the rest for planning and proof-reading.
Write an essay of about 500 to 800 words on any ONE of the following. State a clear stand, support it with facts, give the other side its due, and conclude.
Below is a worked model essay on prompt 1. Write your own first, then compare. The model shows the structure and the level of fact, not the only "correct" content.
India's internal security challenges, from left-wing extremism in the central tribal belt to insurgency in parts of the North East and unrest in Jammu and Kashmir, have often tempted the state toward a purely military answer. Yet the long record suggests a different lesson. Force can clear a district and break an armed group, but it cannot, by itself, keep that district at peace. Lasting internal security is won by pairing firm security operations with development, governance, intelligence and the trust of the people. Force is necessary, but it is the floor of the response, not the whole of it.
The case for force is real and should not be wished away. A state that cannot protect its citizens from organised violence forfeits the first duty of government. Where armed groups extort, kill and run parallel governments, the Central Armed Police Forces and the state police must restore the state's writ, as they have done in large stretches of the former "Red Corridor", where the number of affected districts has fallen sharply over the past decade (verify the latest figures from Ministry of Home Affairs annual reports). Security operations also create the breathing space in which other instruments can work; development cannot reach a village that an armed group controls by terror.
But force alone reaches a ceiling, for two reasons. First, insurgency feeds on grievance. Where land alienation, displacement, denial of forest rights and absent public services leave people with little stake in the state, recruits are easy to find. The constitutional design itself recognises this: the Fifth Schedule and provisions such as the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 exist precisely to give tribal communities a protected stake in governance. A purely military approach treats the symptom and leaves the cause untouched. Second, heavy-handed force without restraint manufactures the very alienation it aims to suppress. Every disproportionate operation, every custodial abuse, hands the adversary a recruiting argument. This is why the Supreme Court has repeatedly insisted that even counter-insurgency operates within the law, and why bodies like the National Human Rights Commission scrutinise force.
The mature response is therefore comprehensive. It combines targeted, rights-respecting security operations with the rapid restoration of roads, schools, health centres and banking; with credible local governance and grievance redress; with development schemes that reach the last village in usable form; and with patient intelligence and community policing that turn local people from suspects into partners. The "clear, hold and build" sequence captures the idea: clearing the area is the security task, but holding it and building it are governance and development tasks. Surrender-and-rehabilitation policies, by giving fighters a way back into ordinary life, do what no firefight can.
It can be argued, against this, that talk of development can become an excuse for hesitation, and that some adversaries, hardened ideologues or externally sponsored terrorists, will never be won over by schools and roads, only defeated. There is truth here. A comprehensive approach is not a soft approach, and the irreconcilable core of any armed movement must be confronted with firm, lawful force. But this strengthens rather than weakens the central argument: even where force is decisive against the hard core, it is the development-and-governance effort that drains the wider pool of support on which that core depends. Force and development are not rivals; they are two hands of the same response.
Internal security, then, is not a battle to be won on a single day but a condition to be sustained over years. The state that relies on force alone may hold the ground and lose the people; the state that pairs lawful force with development, governance and trust can, in time, hold both. For a future officer of the Central Armed Police Forces, the practical lesson is plain: every operation should be judged not only by the ground it secures but by the trust it preserves, because that trust is the real and lasting guarantee of internal peace.
(Approximately 660 words.)
A self-check on this model against evaluation rubric: it states a stand in the first paragraph, orders the body from the case-for to the limits to the synthesis, devotes a full paragraph to the counter-view before answering it, plants checkable instruments (Fifth Schedule, PESA 1996, NHRC, "clear, hold and build") rather than vague assertions, and closes with a forward-looking officer's lesson without opening a new argument.
Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow in your own words. Do not copy whole sentences from the passage. Answer in English.
A border is easy to draw on a map and hard to govern on the ground. The line that a treaty fixes between two states passes through living country: through grazing land that herders have crossed for generations, through villages whose families and markets straddle both sides, and through terrain so high or so flooded that no permanent post can stand. The people who live along such a line did not choose it, and their daily lives rarely respect it. This is the first thing a border force learns, and the lesson is uncomfortable, because it means that guarding a frontier is never only a military task.
The hard cases follow from this. A man crossing at night may be a smuggler, an infiltrator, or simply a farmer returning to a field that the line now cuts in two. A force that treats every crossing as hostile will, sooner or later, fire on the innocent, and each such error costs more than it appears to, because the border population is the force's best source of information and its first line of warning. A force that treats no crossing as hostile invites the very infiltration it exists to stop. The art of border management lies in telling these cases apart, and that art depends less on weapons than on knowledge: of the terrain, of the local people, and of the patterns that mark ordinary movement from dangerous movement.
This is why the most effective frontiers are not the most heavily armed but the best understood. Fencing, sensors and floodlights help, yet they are blind without the judgement of the soldier who reads them and the trust of the villager who reports what the sensors miss. A border guarded by suspicion alone becomes a wall between the state and its own citizens; a border guarded by knowledge becomes a seam that holds the nation's edge together while still letting legitimate life go on. The choice between the two is made not in the capital but at the post, in a hundred small decisions taken by a junior officer in the dark, and it is on the quality of those decisions that the security of the frontier finally rests.
The author says a border is hard to govern because, although it is a clear line on a map, on the ground it cuts through inhabited country: grazing land, villages and difficult terrain. The people living along it never chose it and their everyday lives, including farming and family ties, cross it naturally, so a border force cannot treat the line as a simple military barrier.
By calling a well-managed border "a seam", the author means a join that holds two pieces together while still allowing normal life to pass through, rather than a "wall" that blocks everything and separates the state from its own border people. A seam secures the nation's edge yet permits legitimate movement; a wall built on pure suspicion shuts citizens out and turns them against the state.
It can be inferred that firing on an innocent crosser is costlier than it appears because the border population is the force's best source of intelligence and its earliest warning of real threats. A wrongful killing destroys the trust on which that information depends, so the force loses not just goodwill but its practical ability to tell genuine threats apart from ordinary movement, weakening security in the long run.
The passage says the real basis of effective border management is knowledge: of the terrain, of the local people, and of the patterns that distinguish ordinary movement from dangerous movement, combined with the trust of the villagers who report what equipment misses. Technology such as fencing, sensors and floodlights plays a supporting role; it helps, but it is "blind" without the judgement of the soldier reading it and the cooperation of the local population, so it cannot replace human knowledge and trust.
A suitable title is "Guarding a Border by Knowledge, Not Suspicion" (or "A Seam, Not a Wall"). It fits because the passage's central argument is that the most secure frontiers are the best understood, depending on local knowledge and trust rather than on force or suspicion alone.
Write a precis of the following passage in about one-third of its length, that is roughly 70 words, in your own words, in one connected paragraph. Give it a title and state the word count. Report the author's view neutrally; do not add your own opinion.
The idea of citizenship is older than the modern state, but it has never stopped changing its meaning. In the ancient city it was a narrow privilege of a few free men, who alone could vote, hold office and own land, while women, slaves and foreigners stood outside. The modern democratic state widened the circle dramatically, until in principle every adult, regardless of birth, wealth, sex or faith, became an equal citizen with the same rights and the same vote. This was a moral revolution as much as a legal one, for it rested on the claim that political worth is not inherited but belongs to every person simply as a person. Yet the widening of citizenship created a new problem in place of the old one. When rights are universal but resources are scarce, the promise of equal citizenship can outrun the state's capacity to honour it, and citizens who are equal on paper may find themselves unequal in fact: equal in their right to vote but unequal in their access to school, health and justice. The task of a maturing democracy is therefore not merely to declare citizens equal but to make that equality real, by ensuring that the rights it has granted on parchment are actually within reach of the ordinary person.
Title: From Privilege to Real Equality in Citizenship
Citizenship has always changed its meaning. In ancient cities it was a narrow privilege of a few free men, excluding women, slaves and foreigners. Modern democracy widened it so that every adult became an equal citizen, a moral as well as legal revolution resting on inherent political worth. But universal rights with scarce resources create a new gap: citizens equal in voting may stay unequal in schooling, health and justice. A maturing democracy must make declared equality real. (76 words)