The Constitution of India was secular even before the word was included in the Preamble. Comment.

The word secular entered the Preamble only through the 42nd Amendment in 1976. The substance, however, was there from 26 January 1950.

The provisions that already made it secular.

• Articles 25 to 28 — freedom of conscience and free profession, practice and propagation; freedom to manage religious affairs; no compelled payment of taxes for promoting any religion; no religious instruction in wholly state-funded institutions.
• Articles 14, 15 and 16 — equality before law, prohibition of discrimination on grounds of religion, and equality of opportunity in public employment.
• Articles 29 and 30 — cultural and educational rights of minorities.
• Article 325 — one general electoral roll, with no exclusion on grounds of religion, which abolished the separate electorates that had defined colonial politics.
• No state religion is declared anywhere, and Article 44 anticipates a uniform civil code.

The Assembly's own reasoning. Amendments to insert the word were moved and rejected. Ambedkar's objection was not to secularism but to the Preamble prescribing the social organisation of the country for all time, which he held should be left to the people to decide by the constitutional means available to them.

The judicial seal. Kesavananda Bharati (1973) treated secularism as part of the basic structure even before the amendment, and S. R. Bommai (1994) confirmed it, holding that a state government acting against secularism can be dismissed. The 1976 insertion therefore declared what the text already did.