Supreme Court judge Rohinton Fali Nariman on Saturday said that it was “wholly unnecessary” on the part of the former Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, to have included the words ‘socialist and secular’ in the Preamble to the Constitution through the 42{+n}{+d}amendment on December 18, 1976.
Delivering the first of a decennial lecture series organised by the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court Bar Association (MMBA) here, he said that socialism and secularism were part of the Constitution drafted by the Constituent Assembly even without the explicit use of the two words in the Preamble.
He pointed out that the term socialist was inbuilt in the Constitution since the very next clause in the Preamble, after the one that resolved to constitute the country as a sovereign socialist secular democratic republic, spoke of securing to all its citizens justice — social, economic and political.
“Social justice gives you a clue that we are a socialistic State and every time the legislature makes laws they will look to the welfare of the people generally. They will look to the Directive Principles of State Policy and then make those laws. So, socialism is part of social justice,” he said.
The Preamble also spoke of securing to its citizens the liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship. It was nothing more or nothing less than the cry of the French Revolution ‘Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite’ meaning liberty, equality and fraternity. “If you already have the liberty of belief, faith and worship, you are a secular State because the obverse of an individual having this great belief given to him as a Fundamental Right is that the State shall not interfere. Neither shall the State as a concomitant help one religion against the other,” he noted.
Lecturing on ‘Doctrine of Basic Structure under the Indian Constitution,’ the judge said that there was no straight jacket formula to define the basic structure but for getting some clues from the Preamble and Article 368, which empowered Parliament to amend the provisions of the Constitution.
Supreme Court judge F.M. Ibrahim Kalifulla inaugurated the lecture series and released a printed copy of a speech delivered by Madras High Court judge V. Dhanapalan on ‘Independence of Judiciary.’
