The Right-Wing Putsch on Secularism and Socialism

On April 24, 1973, three years prior to the passing of the 42nd Amendment Act of the constitution during the Emergency (January 22, 1976), a 13-judge bench (one of the largest ever assembled) of the Supreme Court of India gave the nation the "basic structure" doctrine.

The judgement stipulated that parliament had no power to amend certain fundamental features of the Constitution.

These features included: democracy, federalism, rule of law and secularism, among others.

Forty four years after the passing of the 42nd Amendment in 1976, which introduced the words "Secular" and "Socialist" into the Preamble of the constitution, the redoubtable Subramaniam Swamy mounted a challenge to this Amendment in the Supreme Court, demanding that these terms be ejected.

Rebuking the plaintiff for bringing such a suit after so long a lapse of time, the Court went on to lay down that the terms "secular" and "socialist" were "integral to the Preamble" and could not be removed from its text.

Yet, right-wing voices seem to have now suddenly mounted a concerted putsch against these defining terms in the Preamble, contending that their incorporation was a clandestine ploy to evict from popular psyche the genius of our cultural and religious history.

Curiously, many among the objectors also note that the secular and socialist orientation of of the Constitution is everywhere inscribed in a plethora of Articles anyway; yet, when asked why then putting a mast-head to stress that orientation should so rile them, the truth of their ideological prevarication comes to the fore.

Interestingly, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh continues to claim that Bharat, that is India, has always been secular owing to the catholicity of the non-Abrahamic Hindu faith, even as it is unable to explain why, if that is so, the term "secular" in the Preamble should offend at all.

Try this analogy: if we know we have been Hindu for millennia, why are we asked to shout from the rooftops that we are Hindu?

If that is okay, why does it irk that our Preamble underscores our age-old secularism of mind and heart?

Be that as it may, worthies one after the other elected or appointed to constitutional offices have continued to swear their oath of legitimising allegiance to the Constitution as established by law.

These include the honourable vice-president of India, also chairman of the council of states, the Rajya Sabha,

Having so sworn, he has been pleased recently to launch a diatribe against the incorporation of the terms "secular", "socialist", and "integrity" in the Preamble, calling them a nasoor (festering wounds/gangrene) in the body of the Constitution.

One may be pardoned for asking why then should honourable vice-president Jagdeep Dhankhar have chosen to succumb to swear allegiance to such a text, and why he could not have recused himself from the onerous Constitutional duties bestowed on him by the state.

The crude fact

The crude fact, of course, is that however these contested terms may be enshrined in the Preamble of the constitution, the last decade or so has for all intents and purposes hollowed both of their content and neutered their sanctity.

And who knows this more than Narendra Modi, who continues to lead a regime that everyday de facto entrenches the "essential" Hinduness of this country in the national psyche, and who may be given the credit for having reduced that other injunction of "socialist" to a cruel farce, as Indian billionaires burgeon in numbers, as inequalities of income widen more than even in the so-capitalist America, and as the bulk of national wealth continues to be passed on to private cronies.

This awareness on his part may be the reason why Modi finds himself secretly chuckling at the protesters, since he has in the substance of policy and governance long erased both secularism and socialism from what was a welfarist republic not long ago.

Indeed, another complimentary erasure may now also be in progress – that of evicting from citizenship as many of those to whom secularism and socialism carry inalienable import and consequence.

Citizen's peaceful protest assemblies may be a forgotten nuisance, but our new trust must be placed in the plethora of yatras that cramp the national landscape without let or hindrance.

Now, O Constitution, stand up for yatras.

They are secular and socialist at once.

Badri Raina taught at Delhi University.

This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.

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