The day after Republic Day, chief guest Barrack Obama had a sharp reminder for the Modi government: uphold the secularism enshrined in the Indian Constitution. With uncanny timing, the government had issued a print advertisement the previous day featuring a picture of the preamble to the Indian Constitution in which the words “secular” and “socialist” were missing.
With the air thick with suspicion gharwapasi, love jihad and temples to Godse, this naturally gave rise to a political storm. Amending the Constitution is one thing but to do it by issuing an advertisement seemed odd, to say the least. Perhaps it was an inadvertent error? Had a bureaucrat had got the wrong image file? If so, the government ‒ the upholder of the Constitution ‒ should have apologised and we’d go back to normal business.
That didn’t happen. The government denied any error at all and some interesting reasons were trotted out for what had happened. Frank Noronha, the director-general of the Press Information Bureau, told The Indian Express that a new rendering of the preamble wasn’t available, as if to reinforce the idea that the 42nd amendment by which the words were added into the document in 1976 was too insignificant to take note of. Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting, Rajyavardhan Rathore, went one up on this explanation. He bravely declared that the government was celebrating the original preamble as it existed in 1950 ‒ a gharwapsi of sorts for the Constitution itself.
This is illogical. If governments started to ignore amendments to Constitutions, the very purpose of having that mechanism would be redundant. Could the US President, say, deny his citizens freedom of speech just because the original American Constitution didn’t include it (it was introduced via the First Amendment)?
Of course, only a day later, this game of hide and seek was over. The debate about socialism didn’t even get off the ground: it has been accepted as the conventional wisdom that capitalism is the only way for societies to thrive. But the Shiv Sena came out and suggested that many Indians also feel the same way about secularism. Sena MP Sanjay Raut demanded that the word “secularism” be deleted outright because, according to him, India was a “Hindu rashtra”.
Soon enough, Union Telecommunications Minister, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Ravi Shankar Prasad jumped into the debate. “We do not need these words to be a secular country,” he claimed. “Even without them we are a secular country.” According to this reasoning, removing the word “secular” from the Indian Constitution would paradoxically help preserve secularism in India.
To be sure, the idea that the Bharatiya Janata Party wants to snuff out secularism in India isn’t unexpected. Hindutva, an ideology that consciously promotes the involvement of religion in politics, is part of the party's basic philosophy. In the 1980s, the BJP rose to prominence by leading a violent mass movement to build a place of worship. After this, the separation of state and religion must seem like a quaint idea to the party.
Making this change, however, would be a complex process, given that secularism has been held to a part of the “basic structure” of the Constitution by the Supreme Court (SR Bommai v. Union of India, 1994). In case the BJP is truly interested in going through deleting this virtue from the Constitution, it would be a complex process.
In many ways, though, this is a shadow debate that hides the substance of the issue: ending secularism is hardly a simple matter of a word in a book (even if that book is the Constitution). For the past three decades, India has been seeing the increasing theocratisation of its polity. Some signs of this have been small, more concerned with form than substance: government offices bearing pictures of gods and goddesses, government buildings inaugurated with bhoomi pujas, Modi offering the Gita as an official gift to other nations and so on.
A number of other indications, though, were much more grave. In a 1995 judgement, for instance, the Supreme Court held that Hindutva was synonymous with Indianness. Most recently, the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation issued a circular directing its schools to perform Saraswati puja. These gestures equate the national character of a country with the majority religion.
Given the recent past, the rumblings to have the word “secular” removed from the Constitution were maybe inevitable. If it goes proceeds, it would just be the de jure seal on a de facto change that has been underway for some time now.
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