Amid immense buzz around the Narendra Modi government bringing a proposal to change the name of the country from India to Bharat, constitutional expert PDT Achary has said that the Parliament has the powers to carry out the constitutional amendments required to carry out any such exercise.
“Parliament can change any part of the Constitution. Parliament cannot amend the basic structure of the Constitution, but all other parts of the Constitution can be changed,” Achary, who has also served as the Secretary General of the Lok Sabha, told Financial Express Digital.
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According to Achary, the task of changing the name of the country will be a “herculean exercise”, but “can be done”. As per Achary, several constitutional amendments will have to be carried out in order to bring about any change in the country’s name from the Republic of India.
“First of all, Article 1 of the Constitution, which mentions the name of the country (India, that is Bharat) will have to be changed. Then, wherever India is used that will have to go… Then there will be inflections,” says Achary.
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In its landmark 1973 judgment in the Kesavananda Bharati case, the Supreme Court evolved the doctrine for the basic structure of the Constitution and laid down that the Parliament can amend any part of the Constitution but cannot fiddle with its basic structure – a check on the executive and the legislative powers of the government.
So, will any of the amendments required to be made to the Constitution while changing the name of the country amount to changing its basic structure? “No,” says Achary. According to him, all such amendments to the Constitution, including the Preamble, will not amount to tinkering with the basic structure of the Constitution.
“Preamble is part of the Constitution. If you want to change the name of the country from India to Bharat, then the Preamble needs to be changed,” says Achary.
“The Preamble states that we are a sovereign socialist secular democratic republic. If you meddle with any of these things, it will hit the basic structure (of the Constitution). But ‘India’ can be replaced with ‘Bharat’. The name change in itself, throughout the Constitution, does not change its basic structure,” Achary added.
If the government decides to go through with the exercise, it will be the second time in the history of independent India that the Preamble to the Constitution will be changed. The first and only amendment to the preamble of the Constitution was done during the tenure of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1976 when the words “socialist” and “secular” were inserted to the preamble through the 42nd Amendment of the Constitution.
While it remained unclear for a long time whether the preamble was part of the Constitution or simply an introduction, the Supreme Court held in its famous LIC case of 1995 that “the preamble of the Constitution… is an integral part of the Constitution.”