<P> The constitutionality of sections 4 and 55 of the 42nd Amendment were challenged in Minerva Mills v. Union of India, when Charan Singh was caretaker Prime Minister . Section 4 of the 42nd Amendment, had amended Article 31C of the Constitution to accord precedence to the Directive Principles of State Policy articulated in Part IV of the Constitution over the Fundamental Rights of individuals articulated in Part III . Section 55 prevented any constitutional amendment from being "called in question in any Court on any ground". It also declared that there would be no limitation whatever on the power of Parliament to amend the Constitution . After the Indian general election, 1980, the Supreme Court declared sections 4 and 55 of the 42nd amendment as unconstitutional . It further endorsed and evolved the basic structure doctrine of the Constitution . In the judgement on Section 4, Chief Justice Yeshwant Vishnu Chandrachud wrote: </P> <P> Three Articles of our Constitution, and only three, stand between the heaven of freedom into which Tagore wanted his country to awake and the abyss of unrestrained power . They are Articles 14, 19 and 21 . Article 31C has removed two sides of that golden triangle which affords to the people of this country an assurance that the promise held forth by the preamble will be performed by ushering an egalitarian era through the discipline of fundamental rights, that is, without emasculation of the rights to liberty and equality which alone can help preserve the dignity of the individual . </P> <P> On Section 4, Chandrachud wrote, "Since the Constitution had conferred a limited amending power on the Parliament, the Parliament cannot under the exercise of that limited power enlarge that very power into an absolute power . Indeed, a limited amending power is one of the basic features of our Constitution and therefore, the limitations on that power cannot be destroyed . In other words, Parliament cannot, under Article 368, expand its amending power so as to acquire for itself the right to repeal or abrogate the Constitution or to destroy its basic and essential features . The donee of a limited power cannot by the exercise of that power convert the limited power into an unlimited one ." The ruling was widely welcomed in India, and Gandhi did not challenge the verdict . The Supreme Court's position on constitutional amendments laid out in its judgements in Golak Nath v. State of Punjab, Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala and the Minvera Mills case, is that Parliament can amend the Constitution but cannot destroy its "basic structure". </P> <P> On 8 January 2008, a petition, filed by Sanjiv Agarwal of the NGO Good Governance India Foundation, challenged the validity of Section 2 of the 42nd Amendment, which inserted the word "socialist" in the Preamble to the Constitution . In its first hearing of the case, Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan, who headed the three - judge bench, observed, "Why do you take socialism in a narrow sense defined by communists? In broader sense, it means welfare measures for the citizens . It is a facet of democracy . It hasn't got any definite meaning . It gets different meanings in different times ." Justice Kapadia stated that no political party had, so far, challenged the amendment and everyone had subscribed to it . The court would consider it only when any political party challenged the EC . The petition was withdrawn on 12 July 2010 after the Supreme Court declared the issue to be "highly academic". </P>

Why were the words secular and socialist later on added to the preamble to the constitution of india