Ritika Das
(ritikadas108@gmail.com)
In 2020, a petition was filed by former Rajya Sabha member Subramanian Swamy, advocate Ashwini Upadhyay, and Balram Singh wherein they demanded the removal of the words ‘Secular’ and ‘Socialist’ from the Preamble of India’s Constitution. Recently, the SC dismissed the plea by stating that the words secular and socialist are an integral part of India and their relevance is still intact in the society. For those who don’t know, it was nearly 44 years ago, during the Emergency of 1976 when Indira Gandhi introduced these words in the Preamble of the Constitution through the historic 42nd Amendment.
But this is not the first time the words ‘socialist’ and ‘secular’ have been the subject of debate. Previously, in 1948, Constituent Assembly member K.T Shah wanted to amend Article 1(1) of the Constitution. Originally as ‘India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States’, the amendment sought to change it as ‘India, that is Bharat, shall be a Secular, Federalist, Socialist Union of States’. Further, in 1949, another member Hasrat Mohani proposed an amendment for the Preamble to include the ‘Socialist’ word. Both of these requests did not find much support in the Assembly then. But even after not explicitly mentioning the terms socialist and secular in the constitution, India had been implicitly implementing these principles since its independence.
When Jawaharlal Nehru became India’s first Prime Minister, there were some important decisions that he had to make. One of them was deciding the kind of economy suitable for India. On one hand was the capitalist mode of economy which was championed by the USA. He was concerned with the over priority given to individualism in the capitalist order. On the other hand, it was the socialist system whose forefront promoter was the then USSR. Nehru had a strong affiliation for the USSR from the beginning. Therefore, it was a speculation that India would rest its trust on the socialist nature of the economy. He was impressed by what the USSR was doing in order to stabilize the society by using the economy as a medium. But he did not agree with some of the aspects of socialism followed in the world. Firstly, he did not agree with Karl Marx’s historical materialism process wherein socialism would ultimately give way to communalism. He was horrified by the violence of communalism. Hence, Nehru was wary of solely following either of the two. So what he opted for was Mixed Economy. Mixed Economy was the culmination of both capitalism and socialism. It had the liberty and autonomy for individuals in terms of property and occupation but the state maintained control to avoid any infringement of rights or discrimination towards minority communities.
But the story doesn’t end here. While Nehru did opt for a mixed economy, there were other initiatives taken by Nehru which indicated his inclination towards the socialist structure. Nehru believed in Democratic Socialism. It means that both democracy and socialism work on a parallel line. There cannot be a true democracy without true socialism, and vice versa. Both aimed for equality, social justice and fair share for all in wealth and power. Further, the Five Year Plans initiated by Nehru was inspired by USSR’s Joseph Stalin’s idea of Five Year Plans in the Soviet Union in 1928. In India, the Five Year Plans were the centralized and integrated economic plans formularized by the Planning Commission of India which was constituted in 1951.
Next came the idea of Secularism. India is popularly known as a breeding ground for many religions. And within it, there are a plethora of diverse cultures and ethnicities. The Partition of India horrified the Indian leaders to the extent that they vowed to never let such incidents happen again in the future. Hence, the Constituent Assembly, without directly mentioning the word secularism, formulated many provisions which did indicate the secularist nature of the makers. But here was the catch. India followed a unique kind of secularism in the country. According to Indian political theorist Rajeev Bhargava, India opted for ‘Principled Distance’. This was different from the usual French and the American model of secularism.
In the French model, only the state interferes on the issue of religion and not vice versa. In the American model, there was strictly mutual non-interference between state and religion. But the Principled Distance meant that the state had the provision to intervene or abstain from interfering in the religious affairs, depending on the situations in hand. The walls between the state and the religious were not static and rigid but dynamic and fluid. Example, India abolished untouchability under Article 17; there are cultural and institutional rights for the religious minorities under Article 29 and Article 30 in the constitution and so on.
Hence, it can be said that the inclusion of the words secular and socialist only reconfirmed and solidified India’s principles that it has been subtly abiding by, even before the amendment in 1976. The Janata government after Indira Gandhi went on scrapping many of the provisions of the 42nd amendment but it did not interfere with the new wordings of the Preamble. This proves that the words indeed complemented the Preamble along with the other terms-Sovereign, Democratic and Republic.
Some opposing views still prevail as to whether these words are relevant in the present situation of India. There are speculations that India is warming itself to the USA and moving towards capitalism, especially after it introduced the LPG (Liberalization, Privatization and Globalization) policy in the 1990s which gave more power to the private sectors in the country. Even the Planning Commission was replaced by NITI Aayog in 2015. Further, the prevailing ideology of Hindutva is often seen as undermining the concept of secularism. But nevertheless, removing these words can become counterproductive since it may give out a message that India is actually moving beyond its secularist and welfare policies and ideals. All in all, both secular and socialist are one of the hallmarks of India and it will continue to do so.