This year I&B Ministry not only carried a picture of the preamble without the words “secular” and “socialist” but also ignored Muslims on that advertisement. A day after a row erupted over a Republic Day advertisement of the Union Information and Broadcasting Ministry, the Shiv Sena demanded “permanent deletion” of the words “secular” and “socialist” from the Preamble to the Constitution. The words socialist and secular were added by the 42nd amendment. This is the original Preamble almost 26 years older than the one after the amendment. Now there is a need that the amendment must be placed in the public domain, and action should be taken against the persons responsible for this negligence. The words “socialist, secular” were introduced in the Preamble through the 42nd Constitution Amendment Act in 1976.
The 42nd Amendment changed the description of India from a “sovereign democratic republic” to a “sovereign socialist secular democratic republic”, and also changed the words “unity of the nation” to “unity and integrity of the nation”. The jurist and constitutional expert Hormasji Maneckji Seervai severely criticised this amendment stating that the newly inserted words are “ambiguous” and “should not have been inserted in the Preamble without a reason.”
B. R. Ambedkar, the principal architect of the Constitution, was opposed to declaring India’s social and economic structure in the Constitution. During the debates in Constituent Assembly on framing the Constitution in 1946, K.T. Shah proposed an amendment seeking to declare India as a “Secular Federal Socialist” nation. In his opposition to the amendment, Ambedkar stated, “My objections, stated briefly are two. In the first place, the Constitution is merely a mechanism for the purpose of regulating the work of the various organs of the State. It is not a mechanism whereby particular members or particular parties are installed in office. What should be the policy of the State, how the Society should be organised in its social and economic side are matters which must be decided by the people themselves according to time and circumstances. It cannot be laid down in the Constitution itself, because that is destroying democracy altogether. If you state in the Constitution that the social organisation of the State shall take a particular form, you are, in my judgment, taking away the liberty of the people to decide what should be the social organisation in which they wish to live. It is perfectly possible today, for the majority people to hold that the socialist organisation of society is better than the capitalist organisation of society. But it would be perfectly possible for thinking people to devise some other form of social organisation which might be better than the socialist organisation of today or of tomorrow. I do not see therefore why the Constitution should tie down the people to live in a particular way and not leave it to the people to decide it for themselves. This is one reason why the amendment should be opposed.
His second objection was that the amendment was “purely superfluous” and “unnecessary”, as “socialist principles are already embodied in our Constitution” through Fundamental Rights and the Directive Principles of State Policy. Shah’s amendment failed to pass and the Preamble remained unchanged until the 42nd Amendment.
During the Emergency, Indira Gandhi implemented a 20-point program of economic reforms that resulted in greater economic growth, aided by the absence of strikes and trade union conflicts. Encouraged by these positive signs and distorted and biased information from her party supporters, Gandhi called for elections in May 1977. However, the Emergency era had been widely unpopular. The 42nd Amendment was widely criticised and the clampdown on civil liberties and widespread abuse of human rights by police angered the public. In its election manifesto for the 1977 elections, the Janata Party promised to “restore the Constitution to the condition it was in before the Emergency and to put rigorous restrictions on the executive’s emergency and analogous powers”. The election ended the control of the Congress (Congress (R) from 1969) over the executive and legislature for the first time since independence. After winning the elections, the Morarji Desai government attempted to repeal the 42nd Amendment. However, Gandhi’s Congress party held 163 seats in the 250 seat Rajya Sabha, and vetoed the government’s repeal bill.
India is neither secular nor socialist, it has never been so. We Indians like to label ourselves with grandeur; hence the dishonest amendment in 1976. The insertion of the words “secular” and “socialist” into the Preamble was as good as a falsification of history. When “WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA, having solemnly resolved” on “the twenty sixth day of November, 1949”, we did not include the two words. But, the amendment to the Constitution that came into force “w.e.f. 3-1-1977” FALSELY suggests that we resolved for the SOVEREIGN SOCIALIST SECULAR DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC on “the twenty sixth day of November, 1949” itself. This is a deliberate falsification. If one tries to justify the lie, one would end up saying that the Constitution was adopted on only the third day of January, 1977.
BJP and Hindu hard liners even believe that Indira Gandhi and Congress fraudulently inserted the words Secularism and Socialism into the Constitution with 42nd amendment when the country was under emergency rule in 1976. This should have been reversed long back. When Constitution was first drafted, it never had these mentions. Fundamental rights and directive principles of state policy clearly indicate that India is a socialist and secular country. Even before 42nd amendment of 1976, Supreme Court, in Kesavananda Bharti case 1973, had passed a judgement declaring India as secular nation and it comes within basic structure, doctrine and judicial review. Even if the words are deleted, it will not stand judicial scrutiny.
