The Union government has no plans or intention to remove the words “secular” and “socialist” from the Preamble to the Constitution, Law Minister Arjun Ram Meghwal told Parliament on Thursday.

Meghwal acknowledged that “certain groups” were seeking the removal of the two words from the Preamble.

“Any discussions regarding amendments to the Preamble would require thorough deliberation and broad consensus, but as of now, the government has not initiated any formal process to change these provisions,” Meghwal told Rajya Sabha.

The words “socialist” and “secular” were not part of the Constitution adopted in 1950 and were added in 1976 through the 42nd constitutional amendment.

In November, the Supreme Court dismissed petitions filed by Bharatiya Janata Party leaders Subramanian Swamy and Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay, in addition to a separate plea by a man named Balram Singh, challenging the 1976 amendment.

Citing this ruling, the Union law minister said: “The court clarified that ‘socialism’ in the Indian context signifies a welfare state and does not impede private sector growth, while ‘secularism’ is integral to the Constitution’s basic structure.”

The court had said in its order that there was no legitimate justification for challenging the constitutional amendment several decades later.

The minister’s response to Samajwadi Party MP Ramji Lal Suman’s questions in the Rajya Sabha came about a month after a political row erupted about the inclusion of the words in the Constitution.

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in June called for a review of the two terms. The RSS is the parent organisation of the ruling BJP.

A day after the comment by RSS General Secretary Dattatreya Hosabale, Jagdeep Dhankhar, the vice president at the time, had said that the addition of the words “secular” and “socialist” to the Preamble of the Constitution during the Emergency was a “sacrilege to the spirit of sanatana”.

Sanatana dharma is a term some people use as a synonym for Hinduism.

Union ministers Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Jitendra Singh had also voiced their support for a review.

Chouhan had claimed that the words “secular” and “socialist” are not core to Indian culture and called for a discussion on their removal from the Constitution.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi had criticised the RSS for seeking a review of the two words in the Preamble, saying that the Hindutva organisation’s “mask had come off again”.

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.