Preamble like parenthood, cannot be changed 'howsoever you try': Vice President
on Monday said the
Preamble of the Indian Constitution
is like parenthood to children, and it cannot be changed, no matter how hard one may try.
"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--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
.
Live Events
Addressing an event on 50 years of Emergency in
New Delhi
on June 26, 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."
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The Wire
44 minutes ago
- The Wire
The Constitution and Its Discontents: Ambedkar, Marx, and the Sangh's War on Equality
There's a classic paradox from vaudeville. Someone says to Emanuel Ravelli, 'I used to know an Emanuel Ravelli who looked exactly like you.' Ravelli replies, 'I am Emanuel Ravelli!' The other nods: 'No wonder you look like him' (Animal Crackers (1930) Movie Script). Circular logic dressed as insight – not unlike the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's approach to the Indian Constitution. The RSS says, 'We don't like this Constitution.' The marginalised reply, 'But it guarantees equality and religious neutrality.' The RSS responds, 'Exactly – that's why we don't like it.' Their posturing has all the guile of a child hiding behind its fingers, convinced no one can see it. I like their innocence. It is so transparent, so childish. It lacks even the cunning of a Gandhi or the sinister depth of a Heidegger. They seem to believe – in all seriousness – that Ambedkar fought to become an untouchable again, to proudly become what he was born into. That the child made to pull the bullock cart himself – then left bleeding by the roadside when it overturned – was not resisting caste, they say, but merely asking to be abandoned more politely. For a gentler fall. A more dignified humiliation. That the man who was denied water, dignity, and humanity wanted a cleaner corner on the school floor, not the annihilation of the system that put him there. That the Constitution he drafted was not a weapon against graded inequality, but a kind of accommodation letter – a folded note of apology to Hindu society. 'One should become what one was!' – that seems to be the RSS's dream for Dalits, Adivasis, and minorities. A return, not to dignity, but to assigned place. I'm not sure what the philosophical term is. Hegel 's teleological becoming? Or Heidegger 's authenticity? Or just ritualised regression dressed up as destiny? Ambedkar stuffed and displayed This is not misreading. This is a ritual purification of revolt, recasting fire as submission and rage as obedience. This is ideological taxidermy – hollowing out Ambedkar and stuffing him with docility. They preserve the external form (his image, his name, maybe a quote or two), but remove the substance – his radical anti-caste, anti-Hindu, pro-Constitution stance – and replace it with something completely tame and unthreatening. A lifeless, decorative version of a revolutionary. I like their child-like innocence. But a woman in a Malayalam film tells a man having a child-like naivety, "If you had even a little bit of intelligence, I would have called you dumb-witted.' Maybe the RSS can't figure it out – but we, of course, know exactly why they have a problem with secularism and socialism. They have nothing to do with either. Of the six Sarsanghchalaks who have led the organisation since its founding in 1925, five have been Brahmins, mostly Maharashtrian – and the one exception, Rajendra Singh, was a Rajput, hardly a rupture in the varna ceiling. Not even a token Tamil, Malayali or Bengali Brahmin, let alone a Dalit, Adivasi, woman, or backward-caste Hindu. No Muslim, no Christian, no Buddhist, no Parsi – no one outside the tight, hereditary fraternity of the upper-caste Hindu male has ever been allowed within arm's reach of that ideological throne. What socialism? What secularism? The RSS's house has no room for them. The 'Hindu Rashtra' they fantasise about is not founded on equality – it is designed around obedience. And their disdain for the Constitution isn't philosophical – it's deeply familial. It comes from a quiet, generational certainty: this document was not written for them. Not for their kind of control, not for their inherited stature, not for the world they wish to restore. They have long declared – publicly with smug confidence, and privately with inherited conviction – that reservation is not just unnecessary, but actually harmful to Dalits and Adivasis. Because in the utopian ballroom of their imagined Hindu Rashtra, those same Dalits and Adivasis, who bled their way into institutions of power, could have simply moonwalked in – not as equals, of course, but as graceful, grateful slaves. Slaves, yes, but with excellent choreography. No rights, no law, no self-respect – just a dazzling routine of obedience and folded hands. In this fantasy, all a Dalit ever wanted was proximity, not power; access, not agency; a foot in the door, never a seat at the table. Reservation is offensive to them, not because it fails, but because it works. Because it insists on dignity where they prefer dependence, and creates citizens where they are comfortable only with subjects. The Constitution horrifies them precisely because it refuses to let people remain 'in their place.' In their moral universe, servility is harmony, hierarchy is culture, and equality is pure, unthinkable chaos – a cosmic error in need of correction. Inclusion as ornament Their standard response is a familiar one, almost rehearsed: We made a Dalit, an Adivasi woman, the President. We've appointed Backward-caste Prime Minister/Chief Ministers. We don't believe in caste distinctions – it's you who keep bringing them up. I like their child-like reasoning. But the woman in the film says, 'If you had even a little bit of intelligence, I would've called you dumb-witted.' Because yes, they have indeed made Dalits, Adivasis, women, and Backward-castes visible – but always within a frame constructed by the Constitution they secretly resent. In the frame of the RSS, these people are not representatives of power – they are luxuries, ornaments, brief intermissions in a structure otherwise built for upper-caste Hindu male supremacy. When they invoke these appointments, they are not asserting a belief in equality – they are borrowing someone else's grammar of justice to decorate their own ideology of control. That's not inclusion. That's appropriation with a straight face. It is in the Constitutional posts that they have appointed Dalits, Adivasis, women, and Backward-castes, not in their Nagpur office. And they want us to believe that it is because of the castelessness in their mind that this happened. I love this line of reasoning. The Constitution – and more importantly, the arithmetic of elections in a Constitutional democracy they barely tolerate – forced their hand. Now they parade these compulsions as moral triumphs. And the timing is always impeccable – the moment a Dalit or Adivasi or woman enters a high office, often through constitutional mechanisms they oppose, they rush to showcase it as evidence of their inclusiveness, while their ideological fortress in Nagpur remains sealed tighter than an orthodox Hindu kitchen during eclipse. The RSS doesn't open doors – it hangs portraits of the door-breaker after someone kicks them open. They didn't build the house, but they're now offering guided tours and collecting rent. They project their constitutional and electoral compulsions as if they were spontaneous moral impulses – as if Dalit/Adivasi presidents and backward-caste chief ministers just bloomed naturally in the fertile soil of Sangh ethics. They insist that even without the Constitution, nothing would change. 'We are,' they seem to claim, 'innately casteless, instinctively democratic, and born tolerant – we just happen to be carrying the Manusmriti for bedtime reading.' If that's the case, one wonders: why do they tremble before a written Constitution like vampires before a crucifix? Why fight so hard to dismantle a document that merely affirms what they claim is already in their blood? Unless, of course, it's not blood – it's varnashrama dharma that's running inside. Their argument boils down to this: trust us, we would have done all the right things – even without being forced to. It's like a pickpocket demanding praise for returning your wallet – after CCTV footage caught him in the act. Or more precisely, it's like a squatter claiming ownership of a house he didn't build. A house designed by Ambedkar, drafted with pain and vision, meant to shelter the historically displaced – and now illegitimately occupied by the very forces that once rejected its architecture. They didn't just fail to build it – they actively opposed its construction. But now they sit comfortably inside, offering guided tours, hanging portraits, quoting its clauses with patriotic flair, all while secretly chiselling away at its foundations. Others have called it appropriation. But this is more than ideological theft. This is encroachment in plain sight – occupation without authorship, entitlement without ethics. The state that abstracts and the state that doesn't obey In On the Jewish Question, the young Marx identified with astonishing clarity the very contradiction that haunts the Sangh: that the modern state is built on abstraction – a universal citizen stripped of caste, creed, or community – while actual human beings live as situated, embodied identities, shaped by history, culture, exclusion. The liberal state says: you are equal in law. But outside that frame, people live not as citizens but as Brahmins or Dalits, Muslims or Hindus, men or women. But unlike these megalomaniacs, Marx could think. He understood that the contradiction was not just between this or that policy, this or that religion. He saw it as a structural problem – the failure of the state form itself. The modern liberal state, for Marx, emerges as an abstract entity, declaring universal equality while presiding over a society fractured by material and historical inequalities. It treats people as 'citizens' in the political sphere, but leaves them as Jews, Christians, property-owners, workers, or, by extension, Brahmins and Shudras – in the social sphere. The Sangh's unease with the Constitution, however, isn't born of such dialectical insight. They're not worried that the state is abstract; they're worried that it isn't Brahminical. Their problem isn't that the state treats everyone as equal in theory – it's that it tries, however feebly, to act on that premise in practice. Marx asked how the state abstracts. The Sangh asks why the state doesn't obey. Marx did not believe the solution lay in tweaking the machinery of the state – he believed the machinery itself was the problem. The modern state, in his view, is not some neutral tool waiting for moral hands to steer it; it is structurally rigged to preserve domination. It pretends to be universal by abstracting individuals from their material and social conditions – caste, class, labour, gender, religion – and compressing them into a single fictitious figure: the 'citizen.' But this abstraction is not innocent. It reduces everyone to 'one,' and in that reduction, smuggles the bourgeois subject in as everyone. It doesn't erase inequality – it airbrushes it, then frames the result as fairness. For Marx, the goal was not a more inclusive or intersectional state – not a secular-socialist-Bahujan-feminist patchwork on the same old scaffold – but the withering away of the state form itself. You don't ask for better ventilation in a burning house; you expose the architecture as arson. That's what the Sangh cannot process. They think secularism failed because it can let in too many Muslims and Others. Marx knew it failed because it lets in the bourgeois only – it replaces real people with ideological silhouettes. The Sangh wants to rewrite the Constitution to reflect varna, to erase even the pretext of equality. Marx wanted to abolish the Constitution because bourgeois equality was always a mask. The Sangh wants to abolish it because even the mask offends them. The state Between Manusmriti and Maitri But this is where Ambedkar's insights are truly original. Like the young Marx, he grasped with piercing clarity the schism between the political state – that abstract theatre of rights and laws – and the actual state of lived inequality. He understood the contradiction not just as a philosophical dilemma but as a daily reality carved into the skin of Dalits, burnt into wells they could not drink from, etched in temples they could not enter. Yet unlike Marx, Ambedkar knew that the withering of the state in India wouldn't lead to liberation – it would lead straight into the waiting arms of the Hindu order. Marx imagined the state melting away into a classless community. Ambedkar knew better: here, the state does not dissolve – it reverts. The secular state, for all its hypocrisy and half-measures, is at least a barricade. When it is torn down, what emerges is not freedom but the ancient scaffolding of varna, varnished in modern lies. Strip away the Constitution, and you don't get Marx's commune – you get Manusmriti's kingdom. The State of affairs does not vanish; it metastasises into a state of the varna mind – a condition more enduring than any political form, encoded not in law but in custom, in ritual, in gaze. Ambedkar did not romanticise the outside. He knew that beyond the brittle shell of the liberal state lies not utopia but a caste unconscious, waiting to be reinscribed as common sense. Unlike Marx, Ambedkar did not seek to throw the bourgeois baby-state out with the dialectical bathwater. He did not trust the Hindu community to wither into justice. Ambedkar was a believer in macro-structures, in constitutional machinery, in strong Union power that could restrain provincial caste tyrannies. He did not romanticise the state, but he understood its potential as an instrument. For him, the abstraction of the 'citizen' was not a deception to be exposed, but a fiction to be realised – through rights, law, and representation. He was not interested in dismantling the idea of citizenship; that is a luxury affordable only to a potential citizen. He was trying to make it do its job. Marx wanted to abolish the abstract individual. Ambedkar wanted the abstract individual to finally include those who had never been permitted the dignity of abstraction – the despicable, the destitute, the untouchable, the invisible. For them, the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity were not bourgeois flourishes – they were oxygen masks. Without them, the social air remained unbreathable. Even after writing a Constitution with unmistakable socialist and secular underpinnings – and what else are the Directive Principles, the abolition of untouchability, the fundamental rights, if not structural acts of defiance against caste and capital? – Ambedkar was not content. He knew the Constitution was only half the battle. Law, no matter how progressive on paper, is just ink in the wrong hands. And Ambedkar, unlike his more naïve successors, was under no illusion about the character of those hands. If the wrong people got hold of the document – and they almost always do – they wouldn't reinterpret it; they'd implode it. He had no faith in the paper fortress. What ultimately mattered to him was not just the rights protected by the iron hand of law, but the emergence of individuals capable of recognising the other – living in maitri and karuṇā, driven by an internal moral order, not external compliance. Like Marx, he understood that individuals do not live inside the abstract circuitry of the state – they live in the immediate, in the sedimented power of the everyday. The gaze of the Savarna is not produced by Parliament; it is nursed at home – in the family photograph that features only 'our kind', in the wedding ritual where caste is never named but always enforced, in the kitchen where cutlery is segregated for guests without announcement, in the househelp's separate glass at the edge of the sink, in the lower tone used to pronounce a surname, in the celebratory school WhatsApp group that goes silent when a Dalit student excels, in the temple's unspoken rules of access, in the euphemisms for caste that pass as 'culture', in the jokes that are 'just jokes', and in the silence that follows when someone actually names the system. It is performed not through declarations, but through gesture, arrangement, omission – in the aesthetic of inclusion without equality. Caste is not maintained through ideology alone; it is rehearsed in habit – casual, constant, coded. It is in these micro-rituals that disdain is inherited, caste is rehearsed, and hierarchy is made to feel natural. This Savarna mindset remained perfectly intact as power passed from the Mughals to the British to the Indian Nation. The tricolour may have fluttered differently, but the inner flag of caste stayed hoisted in the psyche. This is the unconscious Ambedkar turned to in his final years – the one no election can unseat, no statute can repeal. That is why he turned to Buddhism. Not for peace, but for war – a moral war against the architecture of the caste mind. Not just a new faith, but a new aesthetic of equality, a new discipline of compassion – one that no Constitution could impose, but which alone could make its words true. The RSS is galaxies away from that Ambedkar. Not the statue they garland every April, but the thinker who saw the Constitution not as a destination but as a fragile beginning – one that required daily nurturing through karuṇā and maitri, not khaki drills and conch-shell nationalism. If they had understood even a fragment of Ambedkar – just a sliver of his sorrow, his clarity, his moral imagination – they would not treat the Constitution like a ritual object to be smashed ceremonially under the pretext of restoration. They would have tried, at the very least, to impart the virtues he called for – empathy, friendship, a shared human dignity. Instead of digging beneath mosques in search of buried Hindu grandeur, they might have invited Muslims into their homes and into their hearts, into their festivals. Instead of watching the Manipur violence from a safe, clinical distance – as if pain were a political weather report – they might have walked into the ruins with medicine. Instead of branding Rohith Vemula an anti-national for daring to exist with pride and intellect, they might have mourned him. Instead of weaponising 'love jihad' and anti-conversion laws to police whom people marry, whom they pray with, and whom they dream beside, they might have remembered Ambedkar's call for inter-caste and inter-faith solidarity as the path to annihilate hierarchy itself. But that would require a worldview not built on domination, on obedience, on eternal debt. It would require what Ambedkar called a moral revolution. And the RSS, despite all its rhetoric, has never been interested in revolution. Only restoration – of a past where the wounds of the lower castes were called duty, and the silence of minorities was mistaken for peace. Folding the Mundu for a stream that's miles away In the final analysis, this onslaught on the Constitution – because it dares to be socialist and secular – is not born of moral conviction but of sheer, unvarnished cowardice. There is nothing principled about it. Both socialism and secularism rest on a radical and terrifying idea: equality – not as decoration, but as enforcement. And that is precisely what frightens them. Not because the field is level – far from it. The ground is already tilted so steeply in their favour that it resembles a ritual slope slick with centuries of privilege. Generations of temple wealth, landholding, English education, administrative entry, and capital consolidation have been quietly hoarded in the upper-caste vault – and they still panic at the faintest mention of a level playing field. Their terror is not rooted in the present, but in a future that might arrive – perhaps five hundred years from now, if the winds of justice ever dare to blow that long. They are rattled not by equality today, but by the distant scent of its possibility. It's like watching a Malayali fold up his mundu to cross a stream that hasn't even appeared on the horizon – comically premature, yet somehow deadly serious. They quake before a principle whose real consequences might not touch them or their descendants in this century or the next. And yet, they must kill it – in thought, in law, in symbol – just in case. They proclaim with astonishing volume what should be a whispered confession: We cannot compete, even on a field tilted for us. We want the tilt made sacred. We want the generational advantage to be declared merit. We want our accumulated spoils protected not as a remnant of history's injustice, but as a civilizational right. Behind all the saffron rallies and Vedic declarations lies the most fragile creature of all: an ideology that cannot survive equality – not even the idea of it – and knows it. Anilkumar Payyappilly Vijayan is a Professor of English at Government Arts and Science College, Pathiripala, Palakkad. Under the name a/nil, he is the author of The Absent Color: Poems. A/nil's book, Is There a Dalit Way of Thinking?, is forthcoming from Navayana.
Time of India
an hour ago
- Time of India
'Centre Is Handicapped': VP Dhankhar Warns Of 'Ides Of March' In Judge Cash-At-Home Row
Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar reiterated Justice Yashwant Varma's case and said that the government was handicapped due to a three-decade-old judicial order that prevented it from registering a First Information Report (FIR) without prior permission from the judiciary. Dhankhar, who is on a two-day visit to Kerala, has interacted with students and faculty at the National University of Advanced Legal Studies (NUALS), Kochi. He stressed that several legal provisions appear to have been violated and expressed hope that an FIR would be filed promptly. Referring to Ides of March film, the Vice President said that the judiciary had 'Ides of March' on the night intervening 14th and 15th March.#vpdhankhar #justiceyashwantvarma #cashscandal #judiciary #impeachment #judicialaccountability #idesofmarch #indiapolitics #toi #toibharat Read More
Hans India
2 hours ago
- Hans India
Kharge accuses BJP of betraying Chhattisgarh, says Congress will fight back
Raipur: At a charged public gathering in Raipur titled 'Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan, Jai Samvidhan', Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge launched a sweeping attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP-led central government, accusing them of betraying the people of Chhattisgarh and undermining the Constitution. He accused them of undermining constitutional values, dismantling welfare schemes, and failing to address pressing national crises. In a speech marked by sharp political barbs and emotional appeals, the Congress chief positioned the Congress as the defender of India's democratic fabric and the voice of the marginalised. Kharge alleged that Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government is propped up by allies like Nitish Kumar and Chandrababu Naidu, claiming that Modi is 'walking on the legs of Nitish and Naidu' and could collapse without their support anytime. He accused the BJP of working in tandem with these allies to exploit the poor, while asserting that Congress workers are prepared to sacrifice their lives to protect the rights of the people. He criticised the BJP for failing to implement the reservation Bill passed by the previous Congress government, which aimed to expand quotas for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Other Backward Classes. 'We worked to give reservations to ST, SC, and OBC, but till date there is no trace of the Bill,' Kharge said, calling it a betrayal of social justice. He also took aim at the BJP's economic promises, reminding the crowd that Modi had pledged to provide LPG cylinders at Rs 500 if elected. 'Today, the price is beyond Rs 900,' he said, adding that during Congress rule, even a Rs 1 hike in petrol prices would spark public protests—something he described as a 'trick' designed by the BJP to discredit the UPA government. He condemned PM Modi's absence from an all-party meeting convened after the Pahalgam terror attack, despite being invited. 'We all attended, but Modi did not,' he said. He also lambasted the Prime Minister for not visiting Manipur, where ethnic violence has claimed hundreds of lives and displaced thousands. 'Modi is visiting 50 countries but is not able to go to Manipur so far, why?' Kharge asked. 'Rapes are happening, people are being killed, houses are burning—but he hasn't gone there even once.' In a pointed reference to recent remarks from the RSS, Kharge read aloud from the BJP's own constitution, highlighting that the word 'secular' is enshrined in it. Without naming anyone, he criticised those who have called for the removal of the term from the Indian Constitution. 'They want to erase the word that protects the poor and underprivileged from all sections of society,' he said, warning that such efforts threaten the very foundation of India's democracy. Former Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel and Congress leader Sachin Pilot echoed Kharge's sentiments, criticising the BJP for dismantling welfare schemes, failing to provide employment, and neglecting farmers' needs. Baghel warned that the future of schoolchildren is at risk, while Pilot emphasised that the Congress would fight the 2028 elections with the same unity and resolve that brought them to power in the past. The rally marked a renewed push by the Congress to reclaim political ground in Chhattisgarh, positioning itself as the guardian of constitutional values and the voice of the voiceless.
