India: Can Hindu Nationalists Reshape the Constitution?

How Jayaprakash Narayan, hero for the Sangh, pushed for ‘socialist’ to be added to the Constitution

He had made this demand from the 1940s. Indira Gandhi eventually fulfilled it in 1976.

'Try And Remove': Mallikarjun Kharge's Dare To RSS Leader Over Preamble Remark

Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge on Friday came down heavily on the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) over its pitch to reconsider the words "secular and socialist" from the Preamble of the Indian Constitution while saying that it was "all talk".

Kharge dares RSS and BJP to remove 'socialist', 'secular' from Constitution

Hyderabad: Challenging the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), All India Congress Committee (AICC) president Mallikarjun Kharge dared the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah and said nobody could dare to change the ‘socialist’ and ‘secular’ words from the preamble of the Constitution of India. Addressing the “Samajika Nyaya Samarabheri” public meeting held at the LB Stadium on Friday, July …

India: Can Hindu nationalists reshape the constitution?

The preamble of India's Constitution defines it as a socialist and secular republic, but the RSS — a nationalist group close to Narendra Modi's BJP — argues those concepts are alien to the predominantly Hindu nation.

Playing with the Constitution: India's Ruling BJP's Misdirected Priorities

While it is true that “socialist” and “secular” were inserted in the preamble by the 42nd Constitutional Amendment Act during the Emergency, which remains a dark chapter in the history of free India, it is not true that the values go against the grain or the spirit of the constitution. These are effectively the only parts of the amendment that sit today 50 years down the line.