RESTORE CONSTITUTIONAL PURITY BY REVERTING TO PRIME PRINCIPLES

RESTORE CONSTITUTIONAL PURITY BY REVERTING TO PRIME PRINCIPLES

The Constitution of India ought by amendment to be restored to its pristine form: 'We, the people of India, declare ourselves to be a Sovereign Democratic Republic.' The forty-second amendment inserted the words 'secular' and 'socialist' which ought to be removed by the required amendment. 

India can never be a secular country as it is a pronouncedly dhārmic nation with several millenia of dhārmic traditions guiding its civilisational course. To abruptly try to change national direction must prove futile as it has done so far. Hence, the matter should rest there where the founding fathers of the Constitution had kept it. 

So far as India being a socialist country is concerned, well, it is not so. In a world of predominant capitalism how can India be socialist despite titular pretensions to it? Even China, a communist country by assertion, has renounced the economic principles of socialism/communism and unabashedly embraced capitalism, taking care to hide the shame of ideological capitulation by calling it 'socialism with Chinese characteristics'. Hence, it is high time for us to stop pretence and drop the word 'socialist' from the Preamble as well.

Written by Sugata Bose