Demand to remove ‘secular’, ‘socialist’ from the Preamble uncalled for

AMID the commemoration of 50 years of the Emergency — undoubtedly an indelible blot on our democracy — the RSS has trained its guns on the 42nd Amendment, under which the words ‘socialist’ and ‘secular’ were added to the Preamble to the Constitution. RSS general secretary Dattatreya Hosabale has sought their removal on the grounds that these words were included during the Emergency, “when fundamental rights were suspended, Parliament did not work, judiciary became lame…” The demand conveniently ignores the fact that the Supreme Court settled the matter once and for all last year. Rejecting petitions challenging the two words’ inclusion in the Preamble, the court had affirmed Parliament’s authority to amend the Constitution under Article 368. The SC had also observed that these two terms had been widely accepted, with their meanings clearly understood by “We, the people of India”.

The RSS has also forgotten that the Janata Party government which ousted the authoritarian Congress from power had left the Preamble untouched when it enacted the Constitution (44th Amendment) Act in 1978. A key objective of this Act was to “remove or correct the distortions which came into the Constitution by reason of amendments enacted during the Emergency”. ‘Socialist’ and ‘secular’ survived this course correction because there was nothing objectionable about them, and it is obviously a provocation to rake them up decades later.

Promoting the Preamble in a big way, the Modi government organised its mass reading nationwide on November 26, 2024, the day that marked 75 years of the adoption of the Constitution. This initiative implied that the BJP-led dispensation had no reservations about the content of the Preamble. The onus is on the saffron party to articulate its stand on the matter in the light of the RSS’s demand. The excesses of the Emergency can neither be forgiven nor forgotten, but targeting the time-tested Preamble can be perilous for the constitutional values enshrined in it.

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