Both Preambles are a reality. Why the fightIJ
The controversy that had erupted over an advertisement (featuring the original Preamble of the Constitution of India) the Union Government had released, was never on strong footing; it should now end with Bharatiya Janata Party president Amit Shah unambiguously stating that the party respects the present Preamble with the words “secular” and “socialist” embedded in it.
This knocks the bottom out of the criticism which the BJP's opponents had mounted over the last few days on the ground that the advertisement had “exposed” the party's lack of commitment to the country's secular values and that a sinister design was afoot to reframe the Preamble by deleting the two terms. These critics received some oxygen from the remark the BJP's ally, the Shiv Sena, made, demanding the scrapping of the words “secular” and “socialist”.
The controversy had gained in proportion despite the fact that not a single senior leader of either the BJP or the BJP-led Government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi had suggested a return to the original Preamble which the founding fathers of the Constitution had crafted. At the most, a few, like Cabinet Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, had opined that there was no harm in debating the merits of the inclusion of the two terms.
After all, it is a fact that, while the framers of the Constitution, with all the wisdom and thought at their command — and that was considerable in any situation and definitely more than what the critics today have collectively — had not felt the necessity to insert those expressions. They must have believed that the intrinsic value of secularism was so innate in our cultural ethos that it did not need to be re-emphasised through words in the Constitution.
It is also a fact that Indira Gandhi, driven more by populism than by any high consideration, had used her party's majority in Parliament to include them in the Preamble. India was no less secular before the change in the original Preamble and is no more after the alteration. As for the expression of being “socialist”, let anybody claim with their hands on their hearts that socialism still guides Indian policymaking! In fact, socialism lost its political-economic relevance in the early 90s — only to be revived in a contorted form with disastrous results by a UPA Government goaded by the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council.
The Opposition had latched on to the issue believing that it could link it to the unsavoury remarks that certain Right-wing elements had been making in recent months, ‘connect the dots' and more emphatically conclude that the BJP and the Government it leads at the Centre were pursuing a blatant agenda to communalise society through majoritarian politics and by disowning secularism.
For a few days after the advertisement was published, these critics made hay while the sun shone on the issue. Once their minds were made up, all they had to do was to selectively use issues to buttress their theory. Meanwhile, let us not forget that since the ‘offensive' advertisement had been released in the context of celebrating Republic Day, the use of the original Preamble was to connect with the historical relevance of the day. That was the Preamble the Constitution had on January 26, 1950.