'Secular', 'Socialist': history of changes and challenges to Preamble

The controversy surrounding the words “secular” and “socialist” in the Preamble has come to the fore once again after Opposition leaders claimed that the new copies of the Constitution given to MPs before entering the new Parliament building didn't have the two words.

In the first draft of the Indian Constitution, the Preamble didn't have the words “secular” and “socialist”. The terms were added to it through the 42nd Amendment to the Constitution passed in 1976 during the Emergency by former PM Indira Gandhi-led government.

During the framing of the Constitution, BR Ambedkar rejected demands for the addition of the two words in the Preamble. Babasaheb said that the policy of the State and how the society should be organised are matters which must be decided by the people themselves.

In 2015, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting under the Modi government used an image of the preamble of the Indian Constitution without the words “socialist” and “secular”, leading to some criticism. Then Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad defended the move and called for a debate on the subject. He called it the "original Preamble"

In 2020, BJP MP Rakesh Sinha moved a resolution in Rajya Sabha seeking to remove the word socialism from the Preamble.

The Supreme Court in 2008 rejected a plea demanding the removal of ‘socialist’ observing that in a broader sense, the term means welfare measures for the citizens, which is a facet of democracy.

In 2022, former MP Dr Subramanian Swamy filed a plea before the top court seeking the removal of the two words from the preamble saying they were never intended to be in the Constitution.