Assam CM Echoes RSS: Drop 'Secular' & 'Socialist' from Constitution?
A fresh political firestorm has erupted over India's Constitution, with Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma backing the RSS's long-standing demand to remove the words 'secular' and 'socialist' from the Preamble. CM Sarma claims these terms were inserted during the Emergency in 1976 and were not a part of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar's original draft.Opposition parties, however, are calling the move a dangerous distortion of the founding values of the Republic. Leaders from Congress, TMC, and Left allege that this is part of a broader agenda to rewrite India's constitutional fabric.Is this an overdue correction or a slippery slope?Watch this special News18 segment as we decode the historical context, political motives, and legal challenges behind the push to revise India's foundational document.
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Hindustan Times
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Vandita Mishra writes: Not just about the Emergency
Dear Express Reader, This has been a week of commemoration of the Emergency as a cataclysmic event in the distant past. This has been a week to acknowledge that the shadows cast by the suspension of democracy, 1975-1977, are long. Many of the challenges for a democratic politics are the same, and they have been routinised — the weaponisation of laws to shrink spaces for dissent and free expression, a politics of labelling and distrust, attempts by the Executive to undermine and subdue other institutions like the Media and the Court, demonisation of the Opposition. Other challenges are new, because in its long journey, democracy itself stands at a different milestone. At that time, when India's democracy was less than 30 years old, Emergency was the result of, and it contributed to, a waning of brightness — it capped a draining of the lingering idealism of a newly independent nation that had pledged to be not just a representative democracy, but one that abides by rules of the game laid down in the wise and layered Constitution it gave itself. The Constitution set up a mosaic of monitory institutions to scrutinise power, enforce accountability, enable checks and balances — political theorist John Keane has christened this new historical form of democracy, worldwide in the post 1945 era, as 'monitory democracy'. Today, 50 years after the Emergency, India's monitory democracy is showing signs of wear and tear. It is also dealing with the pressures of the age of communicative abundance. In a global context, Keane writes that 'historical comparisons show that the combination of monitory democracy and communicative abundance is without precedent. It produces permanent flux, an unending restlessness driven by complex combinations of different interacting players and institutions, permanently pushing and pulling, heaving and straining, sometimes working together, at other times in opposition to one another…' Even as this combination makes democracy more exciting and viral, it also has corrosive effects. It breeds cynicism, disaffection and distrust vis a vis Parliaments and parties, governing institutions and leaders. Parliamentary democracy is being publicly 'wrong-footed', says Keane, there is 'decay amidst abundance'. In India and elsewhere, this fraught juncture is now the site of the rise of a populist politics. 'We the people' becomes 'Me the people', there is a relentless search for the Other and the enemy within, and the winner takes all. The populist moment seizes on the prevalent disillusions, as much as it speaks to rising aspirations, to frame an agenda of anti-elitism. It also propagates a politics of anti-pluralism. The week in which 50 years of Emergency were marked ended with a rising — and disquietingly anti-pluralist — clamour that seems to give the lie to the self-righteous lip service to democracy over the last few days by the BJP-led establishment. An RSS general secretary set the ball rolling, asking for a discussion on whether the words 'socialist' and 'secular', added to the Constitution's Preamble by the Indira Gandhi government during the Emergency, should be retained. He was joined by the Vice President, who said that the change to the Preamble was a 'sacrilege to the spirit of sanatan' and the words were 'nasoor', a festering wound. A BJP chief minister chimed in: 'Socialism' and 'secularism' are Western concepts, have no place in Indian civilisation, he said. And two Union ministers added the weight of their office to the argument. This, when successive post-Emergency regimes have not reversed the Preamble amendment, even as other changes have been rolled back, and the Supreme Court has upheld it. Secularism was described as a 'basic feature' in the 13-judge bench Kesavananda Bharati ruling even before the Emergency-era amendment, and the non-justiciable Directive Principles of State Policy have been invoked to recognise that 'socialism' was an ideal for those who framed a Constitution for a society of great inequalities. It is evident that the real aversion is not to 'socialist' — in fact, on the broad direction of the economy, all post-liberalisation governments have looked the same, more or less. This choreographed controversy is about 'secular'. The Narendra Modi government, now in its third term, has presided over the steady challenging of the constitutional commitment to secularism as equal respect for all religions, and a spreading Hindu-isation of public institutions and spaces. 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