Union minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan

Union Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan on Friday claimed that the words “secular” and “socialist” are not core to Indian culture and called for a discussion on their removal from the Constitution.

The Bharatiya Janata Party leader’s comments come a day after the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh called for a review of the inclusion of these two terms in the Preamble.

The RSS is the parent organisation of the ruling BJP.

The words “socialist” and “secular” were not part of the Constitution adopted in 1950 and were added in 1976 through the 42nd constitutional amendment.

Chouhan made the statement while addressing an event in Uttar Pradesh’s Varanasi, marking 50 years since the Emergency was declared by former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s government in 1975.

In a video shared on social media, he said: “The core of Indian culture is equal respect for all religions and not secular.”

Talking about socialism, the former chief minister of Madhya Pradesh added that believing everyone to be like oneself is a core Indian thought.

“There is no need for socialism here,” he said. “We have all said for long that all should be treated alike. So, the word socialism is also not needed.”

In Jammu, Union Minister Jitendra Singh also supported the RSS’s call.

“Any right-thinking citizen” would agree that these terms were added under exceptional circumstances and were not part of the original Constitution, The New Indian Express quoted Singh as saying.

Singh added that Ambedkar crafted “one of the best Constitutions of the world’’ and thus “if it was not his thinking, then with what thought someone added these words”, as per The Indian Express.

Meanwhile, on Friday, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi criticised the RSS for seeking a review of the two words in the Preamble, saying that the Hindutva organisation’s “mask had come off again”.

The Communist Party of India (Marxist) also said on Friday that the Hindutva organisation’s “proposal” “exposes the RSS’ long-standing objective of subverting the Constitution and its intent to transform India into a Hindu Rashtra, in pursuit of its Hindutva project.”

In 2015, a controversy erupted after the BJP-led Union government’s newspaper advertisements on Republic Day featured a Preamble with the two words omitted.

In September 2023, Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury claimed that the two words were missing from the Preamble in the copies of the Constitution distributed to the MPs in the new Parliament building.

In November, the Supreme Court rejected a batch of petitions seeking the deletion of the two terms from the Preamble to the Constitution. The court said there was no legitimate justification for challenging the constitutional amendment several decades later.

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