AMN / WEB DESK
The Supreme Court on Friday (November 22), reserved its verdict on petitions challenging the 42nd Amendment to the Constitution of India, which added the terms ‘socialist’ and ‘secular’ to its the preamble of the Constitution of India.
The top court said that the 1976 constitutional amendment, which introduced the terms ‘socialist’, ‘secular’, and ‘integrity’ to the Preamble, had undergone extensive judicial reviews over the years.
The SC bench, comprising Chief Justice Sanjiv Khanna and Justice Sanjay Kumar, noted that Parliament’s actions during the Emergency could not be dismissed entirely as invalid. “The 42nd Amendment has been subject to judicial review. We cannot say whatever parliament did previously was all nullity,” the CJI said.
The bench said this while hearing petitions by BJP leader Subramanian Swamy, lawyers Balram Singh, Karunesh Kumar Shukla and Ashwini Upadhyay.
Earlier also the bench had said that secularism has always been held to be a part of the basic structure of the Constitution and orally observed that ‘secular’ and ‘socialist’ in the Preamble need not be looked at through the western lens.
“Socialism can also mean that there should be equality of opportunity and wealth of country should be distributed equally. Let’s not take the Western meaning. It can have some different meaning as well. Same with the word secularism,” the bench had said.
BJP leader Subramanian Swamy, who is one of the petitioners, had said that the two words inserted in the Preamble in 1976 cannot bear the date of the original Preamble, which was framed in 1949.
Swamy in his petition had said that the two words, inserted in the Preamble through 42nd Constitution Amendment Act of 1976 during Emergency, violated the basic structure doctrine enunciated in the famous Kesavananda Bharati judgment by 13-judge bench in 1973, by which Parliament’s power to amend the Constitution was barred from tinkering with the basic features of the Constitution.
The framers of the Constitution had specifically rejected inclusion of these two words in the Constitution and alleged that these two words were thrust upon the citizens even when the framers never had intended to introduce socialist and secular concepts in democratic governance, Swamy had contended.
It was contended that such insertion was beyond the amending power of the Parliament under Article 368.
It was further stated that Dr. BR Ambedkar had rejected the incorporation of these words as the Constitution cannot thrust upon the citizens certain political ideologies by taking away their right to choose.