Add a Word to the Preamble, Don't Subtract 2

India@79 | A centralised state or narrow provincialism weren't among India's founding visions. Time to reconsider the case for a 'federal' union that Constituent Assembly member K T Shah made

- Sugata Bose

When India won freedom, some of the finest ideas in the realm of anti-colonial thought lost out in the struggle for power in the post-colonial state. Foremost among these was the imperative of power-sharing arrangements between the federal centre and the constituent units. Partition, with its religious connotation, obfuscated the provincial political dynamics that had made imaginative ideas of a federation such an irresistible goal for a cross-section of anti-colonial nationalists. We need to engage in a creative process of historical retrieval of the visions for substantive democracy and federal union during the freedom struggle that remained unrealised.

On June 26, RSS leaders suggested considering removal of the terms 'secular' and 'socialist' from the preamble of the Constitution. These two words had been inserted as part of the 42nd Amendment railroaded through parliament during the authoritarian interregnum of the Emergency. The erasure of 'secular' would be a symbolic victory for the proponents of a Hindu republic, and consigning 'socialist' to the dustbin of history would be appropriate in an era that brazenly revels in increasing socio-economic inequality.

Both secularism and socialism had been adduced by Indira Gandhi as ideological pillars of centralised state authority. As these columns have cracked in formally democratic India, religious majoritarianism has been harnessed in the service of centralised authoritarianism.