Dharma and drama

Participating in the Constitution Day deliberations in Parliament on November 26, home minister Rajnath Singh spoke about how the words “secular” and “socialist” were interpolated into the Preamble in the 1970s. While emphasising he was not advocating the editing of these adjectives and wanted no further redrafting of the Preamble, he pointed out that the action taken by the Indira Gandhi government 40 years ago had been controversial.

As is often the case these days, there was an immediate outrage on Twitter. Some particularly excitable people accused the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government of wanting to delete the word “secular” from the Preamble. Next morning newspapers picked it up. At least one described

Mr Singh’s speech as “contentious” and proceeded to recount a garbled version of the issues surrounding the insertion of these words in 1976. That Mr Singh spoke in Hindi and his address was reported in English, with many words lost (or deliberately misplaced) in translation, only compounded the confusion.

Given this backdrop, two questions need to be answered. First, how was the Constitution amended in 1976 Second, what were the specific — and different — issues that arose in regard to “secular” and “socialist”

The words were inserted as part of a substantial recrafting of the Constitution by means of the 42nd amendment of 1976. The committee that reviewed the Constitution was a party panel, headed by Swaran Singh and appointed by then Congress president

D.K. Barooah. It comprised 12 Congress politicians. It submitted its report in a matter of weeks, “after limited consultations with associations and individuals deemed friendly to the government” (to quote Granville Austin’s Working a Democratic Constitution).

The 42nd amendment sought to emasculate the judiciary and make Fundamental Rights subservient to Directive Principles. Taken to its logical absurdity, this would make the Right to Free Speech subservient to the Directive Principle seeking a ban on cow slaughter. So absolute was the attempt to give a post facto constitutional legitimacy to Emergency-era absolutism that “the shift in the balance of power within the new Constitution made it all but unrecognisable” (Austin again).

According to Austin, “socialist” was mooted by Barooah and “secular” by A.R. Antulay. There was disquiet on many grounds, not merely because the aesthetic simplicity of the Preamble (“We, the People of India, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a sovereign democratic republic and to secure to all its citizens ”) had been trampled with. As the then Law Commission chairperson, former Chief Justice of India P.B. Gajendragadkar, was to point out, the expressions were “ambiguous and should be defined”.

The men and women who framed our Constitution were not plutocrats opposed to a just, fair and egalitarian ideal for society. Neither were they religious bigots. Why then did they decide to exclude the expressions “socialist” and “secular” from the description of the new Republic they were shaping After all, this was discussed by the Constituent Assembly.

Take socialism for a start. While many members of the Assembly were broadly speaking left-of-centre — not uncommon in the late 1940s — the framers of the Constitution were above all enlightened liberals in the true sense of the term. They wanted to create a document and a basic law for the ages. As such, they did not desire to anticipate or prejudge how successor generations would decide to organise the economy. This gave India the flexibility to be socialist, capitalist, or take any route it wanted.

Now move to secularism. This was a more subtle debate, not because the Assembly felt India needed to be a theocratic state (not at all) but because the Indian state made concessions to religious identities, laws, provisions and obligations (for Hindus and minorities alike) that a strictly secular state (in the Western political science sense) would not. Again, this was and is not unique. The monarch of the United Kingdom is also head of the Church of England. As such, by rigorous definition, the UK is not as secular a state as say Germany. Yet, who would say the British state violates principles of equality of citizenship and access to justice, irrespective of faith

As such, while the Indian state is a fair state and a state above religions (as it must always be), it is not (for the moment at least) a state that is strictly above religion. The difference has to be appreciated carefully.

To be honest, this argument may appear pedantic. If the insertion and retention of the word “secular” is understood to popularly convey that India will have no state or official religion, is that necessarily undesirable Not at all. Even so, how would “secular” be translated in the Hindi version of the Constitution This provoked a heated and ideological argument four decades ago, one that

Mr Singh alluded to on November 26.Indira Gandhi’s advisers initially translated “secular” as “dharma-nirpeksh” or neutral to dharma. At this stage, the late L.M. Singhvi, scholar and jurist and father of Congress MP Abhishek Singhvi, intervened. He pointed out to Indira Gandhi that, contrary to what some of her fellow-traveller associates had determined, “dharma” did not mean religion. It was a word that defied translation, and was most meaningfully rendered as a “concept of righteousness” that was an ancient and foundational ethic of India. It finds representation in the national flag, as the Ashoka Chakra or the Dharma Chakra. It is this dharma that ensures India, as Jawaharlal Nehru so gloriously reminded us at midnight in 1947, “through good and ill fortunes alike has never lost sight of or forgotten the ideals which gave her strength”.

Irrespective of whether the Prime Minister is a Hindu, a Muslim or a Jew, the Indian state can never be neutral to dharma or righteousness. It can and must be neutral to religious faction and identity. That is why Singhvi urged replacing “dharma-nirpeksh” with “panth-nirpeksh”, panth meaning religious faction, group or sect. Indira Gandhi accepted the point, and the Hindi translation of the Constitution came to reflect Singhvi’s wise counsel. May it always do so.

The author is senior fellow, Observer Research Foundation. He can be reached at malikashok@gmail.com