The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a batch of petitions seeking the deletion of the words “socialist” and “secular” from the Preamble to the Constitution, Live Law reported.
The two words in the Preamble were not part of the Constitution adopted in 1950. They were added in 1976 through the 42nd constitutional amendment.
The court said there was no legitimate justification for challenging the constitutional amendment nearly 44 years later.
A bench of Chief Justice Sanjiv Khanna and Justice PV Sanjay Kumar dismissed the pleas against the inclusion of the two words filed by Bharatiya Janata Party leaders Subramanian Swamy and Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay, in addition to a separate plea by a man named Balram Singh.
The petitioners challenged the validity of Section 2 of the 42nd constitutional amendment, which added the descriptors “socialist” and “secular” to section of the Preamble declaring India to be a “sovereign democratic republic”.
The matter did not require further deliberation and adjudication, the court said on Monday, adding that the power of Parliament to amend the Constitution extended to the Preamble as well, Bar and Bench reported.
“We have explained that after so many years the process cannot be so nullified,” the bench said. “The date of the adoption would not curtail government’s power under Article 368 which is not under challenge.”
Article 368 of the Constitution gives Parliament the power to amend the Constitution.
In its order, the court said that the original tenets of the Preamble reflected a secular ethos, according to Live Law. “In essence, the concept of secularism represents one of the facets of the right to equality, intricately woven into the basic fabric that depicts the constitutional scheme’s pattern,” it said.
The order said that the term “socialism” embodied the principle of economic and social justice through which the state ensured that no citizen was disadvantaged by economic or social circumstances.
“The fact that the writ petitions were filed in 2020, forty-four years after the words ‘socialist’ and ‘secular’ became integral to the Preamble, makes the prayers particularly questionable,” the bench said.
It added: “The additions to the Preamble have not restricted or impeded legislations or policies pursued by elected governments, provided such actions did not infringe upon fundamental and constitutional rights or the basic structure of the Constitution.”
The court also said that the circumstances did not warrant an “exhaustive examination [of the inclusion of the two words], as the constitutional position remains unambiguous, negating the need for a detailed academic pronouncement”.
The bench had reserved its orders in the matter on November 22.
At an earlier hearing in October, the bench said that secularism had always been held as a part of the basic structure of the Constitution. It also said that “socialist” and “secular” need not be looked at through a “Western lens”.
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.