‘Preamble like parenthood, cannot be changed’: Vice president Jagdeep Dhankhar tells law students—is it so?

Vice president Jagdeep Dhankhar on 7 July, Monday, has claimed again that the Preamble of the Indian Constitution cannot be changed no matter how hard one may try, for it is is like parenthood to children.

"There have been a lot of issues about the Preamble to the Constitution. The Preamble of the Indian Constitution is something like parenthood to children. Howsoever you may try, you can't change your parenthood. That is not possible," he said.

While interacting with students and faculty at the National University of Advanced Legal Studies (NUALS), Kochi, he also said that, historically, no country's preamble has ever been changed, but lamented that the Preamble of the Indian Constitution was altered during the Emergency era.

"The Preamble of our Constitution was changed during a time when hundreds and thousands of people were behind bars, the darkest period of our democracy — [the] Emergency era," he said.

His statement comes against the backdrop of the RSS calling for a review of the words 'socialist' and 'secular' in the Preamble of the Constitution, stating that these were included during the Emergency and were never part of the Constitution drafted by B.R. Ambedkar.

Addressing an event on 50 years of Emergency in New Delhi on 26 June, RSS general secretary Dattatreya Hosabole said, "Babasaheb Ambedkar never used these words in the preamble of the Constitution. The words were added during Emergency, when fundamental rights were suspended, Parliament did not function, and the judiciary became lame."

Incidentally, the same values are codified in the Bharatiya Janata Party's own constitution, that doubtless Dhankhar and many RSS and BJP members would surely have sworn allegiance to at some earlier point

The Supreme Court, however, has just last year (November 2024) reiterated that Parliament has the power to amend the Constitution of India following due process — and the Preamble is no exception to this, vide the 42nd Amendment.

Of course, legally speaking, a child’s parenthood can in fact change — by adoption. For parenthood, much like the Constitution of India, is not only a factoid of biology or history.

It is also curious that the Vice President of India insists no country has ever amended its Preamble — for, in the first place, not every country even has a written constitution, far less a preamble, with the US having been the first to add one, by way of historical context.

And unlike, say, John Locke's version of the Constitution of the State of Carolina in the United States of America, there is nothing in the Indian Preamble to suggest it is “perpetually established”, “sacred and unalterable”.

Meanwhile, several nations even define the possibility of changes to the preamble of their constitution — take, for instance, Serbia’s: ‘The National Assembly shall be obliged to put forward the act on amending the Constitution in the republic referendum to have it endorsed, in cases when the amendment of the Constitution pertains to the preamble of the Constitution [emphasis ours], principles of the Constitution, human and minority rights and freedoms, the system of authority, proclamation the state of war and emergency, derogation from human and minority rights in the state of emergency or war or the proceedings of amending the Constitution.’

There was, likewise, a similar provision in the constitution of the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia: ‘A decision to amend the Preamble, the articles on local self-government, Article 131, any provision relating to the rights of members of communities, including in particular Articles 7, 8, 9, 19, 48, 56, 69, 77, 78, 86, 104 and 109, as well as a decision to add any new provision relating to the subject matter of such provisions and articles, shall require a two-thirds majority vote of the total number of Representatives, within which there must be a majority of the votes of the total number of Representatives claiming to belong to the communities not in the majority in the population of Macedonia.’

These two examples were actually assessed when the Venice Commission of 2008 was evaluating legal terms for the European Union.

Most quellingly, though, our vice president appears not to be in possession of the legal facts regarding the historical amendment of various other nations’ constitutions — for indeed, there are instances.

The preamble to the constitution of Turkey was in fact amended in 1982, as recorded here by the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), and again in 1995, as the ILO (International Labour Organization) records here.

So was the preamble to the constitution of North Korea in 2012, when it enshrined Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il as the ‘eternal leaders’ of Juche Korea and added that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea had become ‘an invincible state of political ideology, a nuclear-armed state and an indomitable military power’.

Meanwhile, Zambia repealed its old preamble and replaced it wholesale with a new one in 2016.

So indeed, Vice President Dhankhar appears to have been misled by his legal advisors here.

With PTI inputs