Preamble is like a person’s parent, it cannot be changed, says VP Jagdeep Dhankhar
The vice president claimed that no country had altered its Preamble, except India during the Emergency.
The Preamble to the Constitution cannot be altered just like a person cannot change their parents, said Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar on Monday.
Speaking at the National University of Advanced Legal Studies in Kerala’s Kochi, the vice president claimed that no country had changed its Preamble, apart from India during the Emergency.
“The Preamble of our Constitution was changed during a time when hundreds and thousands of people were behind bars, the darkest period of our democracy, the Emergency era,” added Dhankhar.
The remarks came nearly 10 days after the vice president said that the addition of the words “secular” and “socialist” to the Preamble was a “sacrilege to the spirit of sanatana”.
Sanatana dharma is a term some people use as a synonym for Hinduism.
On June 28, Dhankhar said that the Preamble is the “soul” of any Constitution and is not meant to be changed or altered.
This itself had come two days after the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh called for a review of the inclusion of the works “secular” and “socialist” in the Preamble. The RSS is the parent organisation of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.
The words “socialist” and “secular” were not part of the Constitution adopted in 1950 and were added in 1976 through the 42nd constitutional amendment.
After the RSS’s call, Union ministers Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Jitendra Singh had also voiced their support for a review.
On June 27, Chouhan claimed that the words “secular” and “socialist” are not core to Indian culture and called for a discussion on their removal from the Constitution.
Union minister Jitendra Singh had said that “any right-thinking citizen” would agree that the terms were added under exceptional circumstances and were not part of the original Constitution.
In 2015, a controversy erupted after the BJP-led Union government’s newspaper advertisements on Republic Day featured a preamble with the two words omitted.
In September 2023, Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury claimed that the two words were missing from the preamble in the copies of the Constitution distributed to the MPs in the new Parliament building.
In November, the Supreme Court rejected a batch of petitions seeking the deletion of the two terms from the Preamble to the Constitution. The court said there was no legitimate justification for challenging the constitutional amendment several decades later.
