Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar: “Preamble Like Parenthood, Cannot Be Changed”

Vice President Dhankhar claims the Structure’s Preamble is unchangeable, like parenthood, however authorized historical past and world examples recommend in any other case. Is the Preamble really past modification?

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KOCHI: On July 7, 2025, Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar made a placing assertion throughout his interplay with college students and school on the Nationwide College of Superior Authorized Research (NUALS), Kochi.

Reiterating a place he has expressed earlier than, Dhankhar claimed that the Preamble of the Indian Structure is unchangeable, likening it to the immutable relationship of parenthood.

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“Howsoever you might attempt, you may’t change your parenthood. That’s not potential,”

Dhankhar stated, asserting that the Preamble can’t be amended, regardless of how onerous one might attempt.

Dhankhar, lamenting the inclusion of the phrases ‘socialist’ and ‘secular’ through the Emergency by way of the forty second Constitutional Modification, calling that point the “darkest interval of our democracy.”

In response to him, no nation in historical past has ever altered its constitutional preamble, an assertion meant to indicate that India’s modification was each extraordinary and improper.

This assertion comes within the context of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) calling for a assessment of these very additions. At a current occasion marking 50 years because the Emergency, RSS common secretary Dattatreya Hosabole contended that Dr. B.R. Ambedkar by no means supposed for the phrases ‘socialist’ and ‘secular’ to seem within the Preamble, arguing their inclusion was illegitimate, because it occurred when Parliament was not functioning and elementary rights had been suspended.

However what do the authorized info say?

Can the Preamble be amended? – Sure

The Supreme Court docket of India, in November 2024, reiterated that Parliament does certainly have the facility to amend the Structure, together with the Preamble, offered the process laid down in Article 368 is adopted. This was the very route by way of which the forty second Modification Act, 1976 inserted the phrases ‘socialist’, ‘secular’, and ‘integrity’ into the Preamble.

Legally talking, even the idea of parenthood just isn’t immutable, it will probably change by way of processes like adoption. In that sense, parenthood, very similar to the Structure of India, just isn’t merely a matter of biology or historic origin.

It’s equally curious that the Vice President claims no nation has ever amended its preamble, particularly contemplating that many countries don’t also have a written structure, not to mention a preamble. America was among the many first to incorporate a preamble, largely for historic framing.

Furthermore, in contrast to, for instance, John Locke’s Structure of the State of Carolina in colonial America, the Indian Preamble doesn’t proclaim itself to be “sacred,” “unalterable,” or “perpetually established.”

Curiously, a number of nations explicitly define the method for amending the preamble to their constitutions.

Take Serbia, for instance, its structure mandates that any modification affecting the preamble, constitutional rules, human and minority rights, the system of governance, declarations of conflict or emergency, or the procedures for constitutional amendments, have to be offered to a republic-wide referendum for approval.

Equally, the previous Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia had a provision requiring that any modification to the Preamble—or to provisions associated to native self-government and neighborhood rights—have to be handed by a two-thirds majority within the legislature, together with a majority from representatives of minority communities.

These provisions had been notably examined by the Venice Fee in 2008, throughout its evaluation of constitutional modification frameworks inside the European Union.

Extra importantly, nonetheless, the Vice President appears to have neglected well-documented instances of precise preamble amendments in different nations.

As an illustration, Turkey revised its constitutional preamble twice, first in 1982, as famous by the UNHCR, and once more in 1995, as recorded by the ILO. North Korea, too, amended its preamble in 2012 to glorify its founding leaders, Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, and to proclaim itself an “invincible state of political ideology, a nuclear-armed state, and an indomitable navy energy.” Zambia, however, undertook an entire substitute of its preamble in 2016.

These examples make it clear that Vice President Dhankhar might have been misadvised on the constitutional histories of different nations — a number of of which have certainly altered their preambles by way of outlined authorized processes.

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