The Word Added in 1976 and the Idea Present in 1950

On 25 November 2024 a bench of the Supreme Court of India led by Chief Justice Sanjiv Khanna dismissed petitions that asked it to strike the words socialist and secular from the Preamble of the Constitution. The words had been inserted in 1976 by the Forty Second Amendment, passed during the Emergency, and the petitioners argued that an Emergency era Parliament had no mandate to rewrite the Preamble. The Court answered that Parliament's power of amendment extends to the Preamble and that the secular character of the Constitution had long been recognised as part of its basic structure. The judgment invites a question that deserves more attention than the headlines gave it. The bench did not ask whether the word was needed. It asked whether the idea had ever been absent.

The question is older than the Emergency. In November 1948 the Constituent Assembly considered an amendment moved by K T Shah that would have described India as a secular, federal and socialist union. The Assembly did not adopt it, and B R Ambedkar, replying on the socialist part of the proposal, is recorded as arguing that a constitution should not bind future generations to a particular social or economic organisation, which the people must be free to decide for themselves. The omission did not mean that the framers were indifferent to religion. Articles 14 to 16 guaranteed equality before the law and barred discrimination on grounds of religion, Articles 25 to 28 protected freedom of conscience and the practice of religion, and Article 17 abolished untouchability. The idea was in the text. The word was not.