Rewriting the Preamble: RSS’s Challenge To Secularism

On June 25, 2025—the 50th anniversary of the 1975 Emergency— the General Secretary of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh Dattatreya Hosabale reiterated the RSS’s proposal to remove the words “secular” and “socialist” from India’s Constitution. 

Hosabale said the insertion of the words using the 42^nd Amendment during the Emergency era was "undemocratic" move and done so without public consent. In 1976, amid draconian Emergency laws, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had amended the Preamble to include "socialist" and "secular," along with "integrity"

"Those who did this… are moving around with the Constitution in their hands," said Hosabale said, while adding that the Congress party should apologise for the Emergency’s excesses and for redefining the Preamble of the Indian Constitution. 

The suggestion has reignited the debate over India’s constitutional identity and the meaning of secularism.

Since 2024, the RSS has been pushing to remove the words secular and socialist from the Indian Constitution. In December 2023, RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat also said that India has been “practising secularism since ages,” rooted in ancient pluralism—not imported Western concepts, adding the country did not need this spelled out in the Preamble.

Bhagwat had also said India’s Constitution as “the most secular in the world.” 

In response, the Congress Party said the RSS was launching "a deliberate assault on the soul of our Constitution" and undermining Dr BR Ambedkar’s vision. As several states are to o into assembly elections this year, a debate on whether secularism should stay in the Preamble could echo through party campaigns.

Outlook had explored the meaning of secularism in India through its November 2022 issue: The Secularism Question. 

In the issue, Ashutosh Bhardwaj had asked the pertinent question: does secularism have a place in ritualistic India? The senior journalist had explored how India was caught between a deeply religious citizenry and a religion-driven polity, and how secularism faced threats both as an ideal and as a practice. 

SY Quereshi had written about the evolution of secularism in India from pseudo-secularism to ‘sickularism’ in recent decades. And Ajay Gurdavarthy had argued that secularism was a collosal failure in India, stating that secularism in its present form is the result of a collective historical failure, completely at variance with public ethos which is not secular.