Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge said on Wednesday that the Preamble is the “soul of the Constitution” and demanded that the National Council of Educational Research and Training revoke its decision to drop it from several school textbooks.

Kharge, who is the Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, alleged in the House that the Bharatiya Janata Party and its ideological parent Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh were tampering with the school curriculum to impose their “communal ideology” on the people.

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“The Preamble to the Constitution has been dropped from NCERT textbooks,” Kharge said. “It used to be printed in the textbooks earlier. The Preamble is the soul of the Constitution. It embodies the Constitution’s fundamental principles of justice, liberty, equality and fraternity.”

Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, however, refuted Kharge's allegation. “The Preamble is there in the new textbooks of Class VI,” he said, according to The Telegraph. “Along with the Preamble, there are fundamental rights, fundamental duties and the national anthem, too. These also represent the core values of the Constitution. Whatever he read was factually not correct.”

On Monday, reports emerged that the National Council of Educational Research and Training had dropped the Preamble from all Class 3 textbooks and retained it only in two Class 6 textbooks for the ongoing school year.

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In the old textbooks for Class 6, the Preamble was printed in the Hindi textbook Durva, the English book HoneySuckle, the science textbook and all three social science books – Our Pasts-I, Social and Political Life-I and The Earth Our Habitat, reported The Telegraph.

However, in the revised versions, the Preamble is printed only in the science textbook Curiosity and the Hindi textbook Malhar.

None of the new Class 3 textbooks for Hindi, English, mathematics and World Around Us has the Preamble.