Drop ‘secular’ from statute, Shiv Sena had said

Shiv Sena has for long considered as an abomination the word "secular," now part of the Uddhav Thackeray-led Maha Vikas Aghadi's common minimum programme. And its founder Bal Thackeray had openly praised Nathuram Godse nearly three decades before Pragya Thakur spoke in favour of Gandhi's assassin.

After the I&B ministry had, in an advertisement issued on Republic Day in 2015, left out the words 'secular' and 'socialist,' Sena MP Sanjay Raut, one of the forces behind the new 'secular' alliance, had demanded that the two words be "officially dropped from the Preamble of the Constitution through an amendment." Raut had said Sena founder Bal Thackeray stood for a Hindu Rashtra and there was "no space for secularism in Balasaheb's mind."

The Sena founder had said, at an election rally in Pune (where Godse and his family had lived) in May 1991, that Nathuram's act was "a matter of pride and not of shame and had prevented a second Partition." He had alleged that Gandhi had "betrayed the nation" by not preventing Partition and "insisted on handing over Rs 55 crore to Pakistan," all of which had "genuinely infuriated" Godse.


NCP leader Chhagan Bhujbal, sworn in as minister on Thursday, was in the Sena at the time and had remarked amid the controversy that "statues of Nathuram Godse should be erected instead of those of Gandhi."

Interestingly, NCP chief Sharad Pawar was also a part of this controversy. Pawar was then CM of Maharashtra, and some Congressmen had blamed him for the controversy, saying Pawar had started it by saying often that "BJP and Shiv Sena were synonymous with Gandhiji's killer Godse."