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India and Bangladesh are reexamining secularism in their constitutions [1]
['Alok Prasanna Kumar']
Date: 2025-07-24
Bangladesh, a South Asian country of over 170 million people, is grappling with controversial proposed constitutional reforms following the long rule of a transformed authoritarian government and the 2024 July revolution. The reforms have been proposed ostensibly to undo the damage caused by decades of shrinking civic spaces, weakened democratic institutions, and allegations of electoral manipulation.
As Bangladesh debates large-scale constitutional reform, one issue in particular is beginning to echo a parallel debate taking place across the border in India. Two words are at the centre of this debate — “socialist” and “secular”. The word “socialist” appears only once in the Indian constitution and twice in the Bangladesh constitution. “secular” occurs twice in the Indian constitution and “secularism” thrice in the Bangladesh constitution.
Given the epic novel-length of both Constitutions, a debate over these words may seem like much ado about nothing. Yet, the discussion over the word “secular” highlights the deep divisions in both societies about the place of religion in politics.
In India, the demand to do away with the words “socialist” and “secular” has largely come from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its affiliates, collectively referred to as the “Sangh Parivar”. This aligns with their vision of India as a “Hindu nation”, advocating for a government that prioritizes the interests of the Hindu majority over others.
In Bangladesh, the debate over the role of religion in politics also has deep historical roots. However, the most recent call to remove the words “socialism” and “secularism” has come from the Constitution Reform Commission established under the current Interim government. The commission has proposed an entirely new preamble to the Constitution, omitting these words. Rather, they recommend that the guiding principles of the Constitution should be “equality, human dignity, and social justice”.
This article explores why the term “secular” or “secularism” in the constitution has become a source of significant controversy in both India and Bangladesh, and why the debates are both more complex and more nuanced than they seem.
The words “socialist” and “secular” were added to the Indian Constitution through the 42nd Amendment in 1976, during the rule of the Indian National Congress party under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. These terms were inserted into the Preamble of the Indian Constitution, which originally described India as a “sovereign democratic republic”. Following the amendment, the Preamble defined India as a “sovereign socialist secular democratic republic”.
Similarly, the terms “socialism” and “secularism”, originally two of the four founding principles of the 1972 constitution, were restored to the Bangladesh Constitution through the 15th Amendment in 2011 during the Awami League regime. Like the Indian constitution, they were added to the preamble, though in a slightly different form. A whole new paragraph was added to the preamble, declaring that the “high ideals” of nationalism, socialism, democracy and secularism, would constitute the “fundamental principles of the Constitution”. The 15th Amendment also clarified the meaning of secularism in the Bangladeshi context, particularly in relation to individual rights.
However, introducing these words in the preamble did not, by itself, alter the fundamental character of either Constitution. India was always envisioned as a secular republic, which protected the right of all citizens to practice their religion freely and prohibited discrimination on the basis of religion. The Indian state had no “official” religion, and the assumption of India's constitution makers was that the “secular” nature of India’s constitution is so obvious that it did not need to be explicitly stated in the document.
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So what complicates the matter?
The 42nd Amendment is arguably the most controversial amendment in the history of the Indian Constitution for two primary reasons. First, it effectively rewrote large parts of the Constitution to serve the political interests of the Indian National Congress under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The changes were so sweeping that when the Congress was voted out of power in 1977, the newly elected Janata Party government passed the 43rd and 44th Amendments to repeal many of the provisions introduced by the 42nd. Over time, Indian courts have also struck down parts of the 42nd Amendment that sought to curtail the judiciary’s power of review.
Second, the amendment was passed at the height of India’s “Emergency” when civil liberties were suspended and most opposition leaders were imprisoned. Ostensibly imposed to protect India from “internal disturbances”, the Emergency is now widely perceived as an effort by the Congress to cling to power amidst diminishing support after the courts had disqualified Prime Minister Indira Gandhi for electoral malpractice. The widespread human rights violations and repressive measures taken by the ruling regime in the name of “law and order” and “population control” contributed significantly to the Congress Party’s defeat in the 1977 general elections.
The introduction of the word “secular” into the Indian Constitution's Preamble, therefore, carries the taint of Emergency era authoritarianism. This historical context has enabled the BJP and the Sangh Parivar to claim, albeit without basis, that “secularism” was never a feature of India’s Constitution. In reality, India’s Constitution has always been secular in character. In 1994, the Supreme Court of India reaffirmed this position by ruling that “secularism” is a basic feature of the Constitution that cannot be amended out of existence.
Bangladesh’s relationship with the word “secular” has been equally complex. While the country's original 1972 constitution committed to secularism as one of its core principles, this was gradually dismantled following political upheaval. The term secular was removed from the Constitution in 1977 after a military coup, and in 1988, Islam was declared the state religion.
In 2010, the term secularism was restored through a Supreme Court ruling, without fundamentally changing the place of Islam as the State religion. A year later, the 15th Amendment confirmed this in the Constitution while simultaneously confirming Islam as the state religion under Article 2A.
Even as secularism was restored in principle, the 15th Amendment also declared that non-Muslims would enjoy equal status with Muslims and retain the freedom to practice their religions. However, much like India’s 42nd Amendment, Bangladesh’s 15th Amendment arguably carries the taint of the Awami League’s decade-long authoritarian policies under Sheikh Hasina.
The Constitution Review Commission’s recommendations may be seen as an attempt to strike a middle ground between the conflicting ideas of what Bangladesh should be. While the proposals acknowledge the country’s pluralistic, multi-ethnic character and advocate for a secular state, without saying it explicitly, they stop short of recommending the removal of Islam as the state religion. This stands in contrast to Nepal, which formally abolished Hinduism as the state religion following the overthrow of its monarchy in 2007.
India and Bangladesh share much in common — geography (the rivers Ganga and the Brahmaputra), history (from the Mughal era to colonial India and eventually to independence and partition), culture (notably the Bengali language), and a sports monoculture (cricket). To this list, perhaps one might now add a shared anxiety about the place of religion in politics.
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