Why secularism and the cow was included in our Constitution

Express Research

EXPRESS RESEARCH

Dear reader,   This week we celebrated the 73rd Republic Day of India. On January 26, 1950 the Constitution of India came into force. Three years of debate and discussion in the Constituent Assembly had gone into concluding every big and small detail of the Constitution. Several aspects of the Constitution have been making news in recent years, in particular the value of secularism and the significance of the cow in the Indian psyche. Two articles from our archives unravel the vibrant discussions that went into the inclusion of these two subjects in the Indian constitution.    This story from 2017 digs into when and how secularism came to be included in the preamble of our Constitution. Interestingly, the biggest proponents of secular India, Jawaharlal Nehru and B R Ambedkar, were staunchly against its inclusion in the preamble. It was only in 1976 during the Emergency declared by the Indira Gandhi led government, that the word secularism came to be included in the Constitution. The article explains the reasons behind Nehru and Ambedkar opposing secularism’s inclusion in the Constitution and why Gandhi included it.    The other story from 2021 talks about how the cow came to be debated in the Constituent Assembly and why a clause was added in the Directive Principles of State Policy asking states to take steps for the prohibition of cow slaughter. Ambedkar opposed the imposition of ban on cow slaughter as a fundamental right. It was Rajendra Prasad who came up with Directive Principles of State Policy as a solution.   Read the articles: Secularism: Why Nehru dropped and Indira inserted the S-word in the Constitution   How the cow came to be debated in Constituent Assembly and why Article 48 was added to Constitution   Sincerely,   Adrija Roychowdhury

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