The Absurdity of Observing ‘Samvidhan Hatya Divas’

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leadership seems frustrated and desperate to have given a name like Samvidhan Hatya Divaa, “A Day Observing Murder of the Constitution” to mark the imposition of Emergency on June 26, 1975, by the  then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi. Clearly, the ruling party has done so without taking into account how appropriate that name would be to invoke people’s commitment to the Constitution. If the Constitution was indeed murdered on that day, then how did the Members of the 18th Lok Sabha, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi and 240 BJP MPs, take oath on it?

If the Constitution was “murdered” 50 years ago, why did the Modi regime take pride in commencing, for the first time in the history of our Republic, the Constitution Day on November 26, 2015, and continues to do so every year? On that day in 1949, the Constituent Assembly had adopted and enacted the Constitution of India which declared that “We the people” resolve to constitute “India into a SOVEREIGN SOCIALIST SECULAR DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC. “

It is that transformative Constitution, described as the “corner stone of a nation” that endures. The people of the country, in the recently held elections to the 18th Lok Sabha, made an electoral issue of saving the Constitution. So, how did Home Minister Amit Shah, who took oath as MP and later as a cabinet minister recently, owe allegiance to the Constitution of India and now issue a gazette notification saying that it was “murdered” on June 25, 1975 by Indira Gandhi?

No one terms the day Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated as ‘Gandhi Hatya Divas (Gandhi Murder Day).  No one terms the day Indira Gandhi was assassinated as ‘Indira Gandhi Hatya Divas’ (Indira Gandhi Murder Day). 

Surely, there could have been a better name like Samvidhan Suraksha Divas (Save the Constitution) than ‘Samvidhan Hatya Divas’.

 BJP Rattled by People Making Saving Constitution a Poll issue

It is quite clear that the top BJP leadership, including Modi and Shah, is rattled after losing majority in the 18th Lok Sabha because Congress, INDIA bloc partners and people in several states made ‘Saving the Constitution’ an electoral issue, after some BJP candidates claimed that Modi and BJP, on winning 400 plus seats and forming the government at the Centre for the third time, would change the Constitution. 

The party’s leadership is at its wit’s end to counter this and, in their desperation, seems to have found no way out but to   recklessly coin the nomenclature, Samvidhan Hatya Divas, bereft of any semblance of decency, grace and decorum to uplift the spirit of people in defence of the Constitution.

RSS’s Attack on the Constitution

The BJP leadership should be mindful that when the Constitution was being framed in the Constituent Assembly, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or RSS, to which most BJP leaders, including Modi, belong, had dismissed it in a piece published its mouth piece, Organiser, on November 30, 1949, four days after the Constitution was adopted and enacted.  

In a condemnatory tone, the Organiser article said there was nothing ‘Bharatiya’ in the Constitution and indicted its framers for “borrowing heavily” from British practices and used many provisions of the “…American, Canadian, Swiss and sundry other constitutions” and never factored in the “laws as enunciated in the Manusmriti” to frame it.

The Organiser had, in another issue, written scathingly about B R Ambedkar, who was the Chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Constituent Assembly and had played a crucial role in the framing of the Constitution.

In fact, what the RSS mouthpiece wrote when the Constitution had not been enforced, amounted to killing it at its infant stage. Hence, the BJP’s claim now that it was murdered on June 25, 1975, is false and designed to find an escape route for it and signal a message to the electorate that it is safeguarding the Constitution from the Congress who gave it a “fatal blow” 50 years ago.

BJP’s Recent Attack on Constitution

It is rather naïve on the part of the BJP leadership to create an impression in the minds of people by spinning a narrative that the party stands for the protection of the Constitution. In fact, during the past two years, its leader S P Singh Baghel, as a Union Minister, had made outrageous statements that the basic structure of the Constitution was Hindu Rashtra. Even Vice President Jagdeep Dhankar had absurdly claimed that Parliament had the power to amend the Constitution’s basic structure, despite the Supreme Court, in the Keshavanand Bharti case declaring in 1974, holding that its ‘basic structure’ cannot be changed.

People’s Resolve to Save Constitution

Prime Minister Modi, on January 22, 2024, on the occasion of the consecration of the Ram temple in Ayodhya, had violated the ideal of neutrality of the State vis-a-vis religion by claiming that “Ram meant Rashtra, Ram meant the State, and Dev meant Desh, God means the Country.” Such pronouncements coming from the occupant of the office of the Prime Minister, constitutes a fatal attack on the Constitution, which does not define either the Indian State or India in the name of any Hindu deity or any divine figure.

Hence, the Prime Minister was acting against the very grain of the Constitution, stabbing its ideals with a death wish. Now the Union Home Minister’s pronouncement that the government had decided to observe ‘Samvidhan Hatya Divas’ sounds ridiculous and is contrary to the will of the people, who conveyed an unmistakable message to BJP by snatching away its majority in Lok Sabha, that they are in the forefront to save the Constitution from BJP’s onslaught.

The writer served as Officer on Special Duty to President of India K R Narayanan. The views are personal.