What started as a reach out by a reporter of The Wire, for a comment on the blasphemous act of the district administration of Baghpat, Uttar Pradesh, which inaugurated a Constitution Park with a stone mounting inscribed over which was a mutilated/censored version of the Preamble to the Indian Constitution, provided an opportunity to probe deeper and comprehend why the extant version of this essential declaration, remains perennially problematic for the Sangh Parivar.This naturally meant examining how the Preamble – a declaration listing various purposes for which the Constitution – was adopted and given to every citizen after being enacted, evolved in the course of the national movement and the reasons why it was amended.The report, published in The Wire Hindi as well as in The Wire, informed readers that Asmita Lal, district magistrate (DM) (an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer who would have necessarily taken oath of allegiance to the Constitution of India upon her appointment) along with a minister of state in Uttar Pradesh, K.P. Malik, inaugurated the park within the premises of the Municipal Council of Baraut town, paradoxically on Republic Day.The report specified that the Preamble in Hindi, in this stone installation, did not include three crucial words which provide a specific political orientation to the Constitution – ‘socialist’, ‘secular’ and ‘integrity’ (samajwadi, panthnirpeksh and akhandata in Hindi).The explanation for this exclusion, provided to the reporter by the DM, was that these words were not there in the “original” Preamble as passed and adopted by the Constituent Assembly.Everyone knows that the Indian Constitution can be amended by Parliament, although within limits laid down by the Supreme Court in its well-known judgement in the Kesavananda Bharati case, in 1973. So would the likes of the DM, cite only from the ‘original’ Constitution every time a quotation or reference has to be used or made?The Preamble has been amended only onceThe Preamble has been amended only once, during Emergency in October-November 1976, when Indira Gandhi was the prime minister. These words were inserted through the omnibus 42nd Amendment, often termed mini-Constitution.The prime minister’s contention during the debate in the last week of October 1976 was that the amended Preamble merely spelt out “what was already there in the Constitution.”She elaborated, the “founding fathers of our Constitution and of our country had intended Indian society to be secular and socialist. These are not new definitions. They have guided our laws all these years…”Almost two decades later, even the Supreme Court attested to the political correctness of her assertion by writing in the judgement of the SR Bommai v. Union of India case, that secularism was a fundamental feature of the Constitution from the beginning.According to Subhash Kashyap, the noted Constitutional expert, Gandhi inserted ‘socialist’ as a message to the underprivileged poor to reiterate her popular 1971 slogan of Garibi Hatao. Such reiteration was required by protests which rocked her government and was one of the reasons for her to impose Emergency.Besides messaging to the people that she had not gone back on her pro-poor stance, the word ‘secular’ was also included because minorities were incensed at the government’s sterilisation campaign.Such messaging failed to yield electoral dividends. Following her defeat in 1977, the Janata Party government, which included the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) political ancestor, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS), found major sections of this Amendment politically questionable and repealed them.However, changes in the Preamble were not rolled back, because despite reservations about India constitutionally committing to be a secular and socialist Republic, Jana Sangh leaders, and possibly other constituents of the JP, did not have political courage to say so in public.Along with the Preamble, the Morarji Desai government also left untouched in the 42nd Amendment, the segment that pertaining to Fundamental Duties that were introduced by Gandhi’s government as Article 51 (A).In almost fifty years since then, the Sangh Parivar has regularly questioned the amendment to the Preamble and the insertion of the three words, although their ire is mainly directed at ‘secular’.The BJP even established a Constitution Review Committee when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was Prime minister, but was forced to trim its scope after political furore.Most recently, the general secretary of Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Dattatreya Hosabale, in June 2025, questioned the words ‘socialist’ and ‘secular’ and called for a national debate on this subject (he did not mention ‘integrity’ probably because that word is not as troublesome for Hindu majoritarian forces).Following political tumult over Hosabale’s remarks, Union law minister Arjun Ram Meghwal informed the Rajya Sabha during last year’s Monsoon Session that the “government has not formally initiated any legal or constitutional process to remove the words ‘socialist’ and ‘secular’ from the Preamble.”He added, “While there may be discussions or debates in certain public or political circles, no formal decision or proposal has been announced by the government, regarding amendments to these terms.”Previously too, there were several occasions when Sangh Parivar leaders spoke in Hosabale’s vein. In January 2015, the Information and Broadcasting released an advertisement for the Republic Day without the two words – ‘socialist’ and ‘secular’.Media reports pointed out that the ad had a visual that did not represent India’s religious diversity; the photos were of people who either looked Hindu or tribal. There was no Sikh with a turban or a Muslim with a skull cap.RSS, BJP’s emphasis on fundamental duties while ignoring fundamental rightsIn another instance of the Sangh Parivar’s political duplicity and selective targeting of sections comprising the 42 Amendment, numerous senior leaders, including Modi, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat and former president Ram Nath Kovind, have insisted on the necessity for citizens to first fulfil their “fundamental duties”, and not seek constitutionally enshrined rights.In fact, the Rajpath’s renaming as Kartavya Path and all new ministerial buildings which are coming up as part of the Central Vista project, too being named Kartavya Bhavans, is an undisguised message that fulfilling duties is more important.At the time when the current political regime mounts multiple attacks on the envisioned character of the Indian Republic, an important book by noted vocalist in the Karnatik tradition, TM Krishna – We, The People of India: Decoding a Nation’s Symbols – becomes essential reading for taking readers on a virtual journey into the past when India’s symbols – the National Flag, the National Emblem – Lion Capital, the National Motto – Satyameva Jayate, the National Anthem and the Preamble were adopted.By its last pages, the book ceases to be a lifeless tome, but emerges as a comrade in arms in these testing times.It is precisely because of the incessant divisiveness of the ruling party’s narrative, that Krishna contends that the line asserting that the Constitution was adopted with the intention to ‘promote’ fraternity, and to simultaneously assure the “dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the Nation,” was the “most arresting line” in the Preamble.Despite this, the rank and file of the Sangh Parivar and those bureaucrats, who have chosen to forget the oath they took on entering service and instead cosied up to powers that be, have the gumption to exclude the word ‘integrity’ of none other, but the country.As if to buttress his contention about the line beginning with ‘fraternity’, Krishna points out that when B.R. Ambedkar submitted the Draft Constitution to the Chair of the Constituent Assembly, Rajendra Prasad, on February 21 1948, by when Indian was deeply engulfed in an unprecedented communal holocaust and had been a stunned witness to the assassination of the tallest and the most genial of all Indians, he appended a quasi-explanatory letter.Ambedkar wrote about the Drafting Committee adding a “clause about fraternity in the Preamble, although it does not occur in the Objectives Resolution. The Committee felt that the need for fraternal concord and goodwill in India was never greater than now and that this particular aim of the new Constitution should be emphasised by special mention in the Preamble.”Given this precedent, the decision in 1976 to include protecting the nation’s ‘integrity’, along with its ‘unity’, being a fundamental objective of the Constitution, was absolutely appropriate. The removal of this word is little but sacrilegious towards the nation.In the section where Krishna explores how India’s founding parents got to November 26, 1949 when the Preamble along with the Constitution was adopted by the CA, he wittingly recalls a passage from Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste. That paragraph was concluded by Ambedkar which left no ambiguity: “…This is fraternity, which is only another name for democracy.”Looking back, disconnected bureaucrats and power-hungry majoritarian politicians may categorise the Preamble as unimportant and a short jumble of words. Which is why, their linear minds embark on arbitrary exclusions of words, which carried much meaning and gravity for those who crafted and debated the Constitution.RSS leaders continue to question the Constitution and its various partsIn this innovative voyage into the past, Krishna takes us into the heart of our symbols and we get to know stories about how they evolved and that the Preamble had its origins, possibly in the opening lines of the 1931 Swarajya Resolution.At the outset, the Resolution emphasised economic freedom because it “was necessary to end exploitation.” Therein lay many an idea which eventually led to the notion that India must follow a socialist path.The 1931 declaration also mentioned the need for freedom of speech, press and profession, all of which, directly or indirectly, made it to the list of Fundamental Rights. But over and above all these aspirations, was the Right for the “practise of religion” and for no discrimination on the basis of “religion, caste or creed.”The spirit of the 1931 Resolution, ironically adopted in Karachi, hop-skipped to December 13 in 1946 when when Jawaharlal Nehru presented to the CA, the Objectives Resolution.Just as the text that Nehru read out, had built on the declaration adopted in 1931, the group chaired by Ambedkar too, went past the 1946 Resolution.Likewise, the government in 1976, even though legislated during a sad period when democracy was eclipsed, pushed the spirit of the Preamble forward and made it more definitive.All governments have the constitutional path open for making changes in the nation’s declarations and laws, provided the Constitution’s Basic Structure is not altered. But such change or amendment, have to be made transparently and not by subterfuge.Ministers of the current government and ruling party leaders cannot continue to make assurances of ‘no-change’, while the rank and file and affiliates holding no official positions, keep making demands of erasing all that is politically inconvenient for the Sangh Parivar or stands in conflict with its ideology.But, the likes of Hosabale continue to question the Constitution and its various parts, even when those occupying official positions, pay lip service. This carousel for adults keeps moving in concentric circles, because they are strapped to the central idea, articulated by revered ideologues of the Sangh Parivar.There is little doubt that the postulations of their icons, V.D. Savarkar, K.B. Hegdewar, M.S. Golwalkar, Balasaheb Deoras and many others, carry far greater weight when compared with the Constitution and sayings of national greats.A precise mapping of the disagreement of these icons of the Indian Hindu rightwing, with the fundamental expressions and formations that have evolved in the course of the national movement, and over several decades of India’s republican history, can wait for another day.Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay is a journalist and author whose books include Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times and The RSS: Icons of the Indian Right.