Shikha Mukerjee | Socialist, Secular… or Not? Tussles over Constitution

The mission to “save the Constitution in its original form” launched after RSS general secretary Dattatreya Hosabale called for a reconsideration of the add-ons of “secular” and “socialist” to the Preamble during the course of the 21-month Emergency, when fundamental rights were suspended and most parts of the Constitution were shoved into a deep freeze, was basically gas-lighting. By choosing to speak about it at an event organised to condemn the imposition of Emergency by the Congress, Mr Hosabale was targeting the BJP’s principal political foe and he whistled up the vigilantes to spring into action.

The habit of obedience having been drilled into every member of the Sangh Parivar, Mr Hosabale’s carefully crafted prompt produced the expected reaction. First, the BJP’s ministers and chief ministers took the lead, and then vice-president Jagdeep Dhankar. The measured words of Mr Hosabale were substituted for language that was designed to add urgency to a controversy and convert it into a confrontation over purity and “sacrilege”, a “festering wound”, and then drown the concoction in a “foreign” dressing.

The noise that is touching ear-splitting levels over the sacrilegious inclusion of “secular” and “socialist” in the Constitution’s Preamble happened near about 50 years ago, after the 42nd Amendment was rammed through a biddable Parliament by Indira Gandhi as Prime Minister. Before 1976 and after 1976, the RSS and the BJP, which was reconstituted in 1980 from the Jan Sangh, have had ideological problems with the concept of secularism and socialism. The current outrage is, therefore, hugely OTT.

The RSS-BJP-Sangh Parivar’s problems with the ideas of secularism and socialism have nothing to do with changes in 1976 to the Constitution’s Preamble. Whereas the older generation of Jan Sangh-BJP leaders like Atal Behari Vajpayee had the intellectual calibre to understand what they were opposing, the new generation, feeding on the simplifications of a diet made up of social media posts, is clueless.

Assam’s chief minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma, among the loudest voices amplifying Mr Hosabale’s message, reduced the idea of secularism to an absurd question: “How can I be secular? I am a hardcore Hindu.” The Constitution provides for Mr Sarma to be a hardcore Hindu to his heart’s content; all he has to do is check out Part III, Article 25, of the book that guarantees him and his alter ego, the hardcore Muslim, the fundamental right to freedom of conscience and free profession, practice and propagation of religion in his individual capacity. In order for Mr Sarma and his alter ego to be free to be hardcore believers, the framers of the Constitution, in the aftermath of Partition, had to lay down the law, granting freedom of religion to everyone and insulating the State and by extension the government from the embrace of a specific religion. If, as Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis said, embracing the Constitution can solve 90 per cent of India’s problems, the question is why has not the BJP government under Narendra Modi’s stewardship as Prime Minister done so? Given the inadequacy of the political leadership in crafting a controversy and building it up into a convincing campaign, Mr Hosabale may need to rethink how to design a gas-lighting issue.

The energy and inventiveness of the drive to purify the Constitution is just one obvious sign that in 1975 it was not murdered, because the document that is now at the centre of the controversy, that is being built up into a political confrontation with the Congress and the parties opposed to the BJP, is neither a phantom nor a mummified version of the original. It is, as Mr Hosabale noted, a living document that is rather full of changes. The document that was drafted and approved by the committee presided over by Dr B.R. Ambedkar was amended six times before he passed away in 1956. The reorganisation of states on a linguistic basis amendment was waiting to be passed when he died.

The RSS may be obsessed with retro and restoring the past; the BJP can mimic the sentiments of its parent organisation. In its work, it can’t be hung up on the past, because it needs to prevail in the present and continue to do so in the future.

The noise has a purpose, and what that is is open to speculation. The obvious purpose is political and to keep the faithful fully engaged in an old fight in an apparently new reincarnation. The desired effect is probably to get the cadres, volunteers, those on the periphery and hangers-on to mobilise, having been called up to defend the Constitution and junk their preoccupation with problems of more personal consequence, like money, inadequate incomes to cover the cost of living, shrinking opportunities and the grind that goes with being part of the gig economy, because there is a significant absence of buoyancy in the economy. The recent byelection results were not a report on the state of the political weather, and that may be why the results matter so much. The BJP gained nothing, even as the Opposition parties secured the seats they held before the byelections. This could be an indication of a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the BJP among voters, even in its bastion states like Gujarat, despite being in power for seven terms. As the party with the biggest ambitions and highest stakes in managing the political weather, the BJP has reasons to want to find a cause that can engage the attention of the masses.

The last thing the BJP needs at this point is a popular sentiment that reflects it has hit the indifference curve; when regardless of the combination or choice, the voter is equally satisfied with staying loyal to the “other” side, as the byelections revealed. If it is worried about the indifference curve then it needs an issue, a big beautiful bang that the BJP and the Sangh Parivar can use to power the challenge of India’s fiercely competitive electoral politics. With crucial elections coming up from the end of 2025 and into 2026, it needs to build momentum.

Picking on secularism, even after the Supreme Court in November 2024 dismissed writ petitions challenging the legality of the change in the Preamble, is a passable political gambit. Picking on socialism is not; not unless the RSS fears that the Left led by the array of Communist and Socialist parties, rebranded in different states under various names like the Rashtriya Janata Dal and Samajwadi Party, are on the verge of staging a comeback. That poses an intriguing possibility of the BJP trapped in the indifference curve and searching for ways to escape it.