Shanti Bhushan was a legal luminary who had secularism woven into the fabric of his very being, former Supreme Court judge Justice Rohinton Nariman said while paying tribute to the late Union Law Minister.

Justice Nariman recounted from Shanti Bhushan's memoir, Courting Destiny, that his family was staunchly secular, with his father paying homage to three religions, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity, at a havan organised when his sister was born.

"We understand from Shantiji's autobiography that his was a secular family. His father Vishwamitra had a havan performed when his sister Sudha was born. On two of the sides of the mandap, he had in Sanskrit, God is great. On one of the other sides he had Allahu akbar and on another side he had God is great for the Christian faith. This faced huge opposition as you can imagine but his father pushed through and the havan was carried out despite the murmers.This is something important thing that one must remember to understand the mental makeup of Shantiji ever since he was a child."

The same faith in secularism caused Bhushan to resign from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 1986, only 6 years after he joined it, Justice Nariman said. He also left the Aam Aadmi Party of which he was a part in later years when he disapproved of the kind of people being brought in by party chief Arvind Kejriwal.

"Shanti Bhushan joined the BJP in 1980 and resigned from the BJP in 1986, saying that they were not secular. You remember how I started this speech by saying the secular tradition of his family was uppermost in his mind. Then he joined AAP in 2014 and left it when he found that Arvind Kejriwal was letting in all sorts of persons to come in and stand for election. So here you had a man of tremendous commitment, a man who believed what he said, and he stood up for what he said," Justice Nariman explained.

Justice Nariman was delivering the first Shanti Bhushan Centenary Memorial Lecture.

The former Supreme Court judge also opined that the spirit of secularism carried through in Shanti Bhushan's work as a lawyer and later as Law Minister.

As Union Law Minister in the Janata government which took charge after the tumultuous emergency era, Bhushan had his task set out for him - to roll back the constitution amendments that former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had pushed through.

Prime among these was the 42nd Amendment, which had stomped down on the powers of constitutional courts in the country and curbed citizens' fundamental rights.

Justice Nariman recounted that Bhushan managed to undo much of the damage and that he fortunately did not undo the insertion of the words secular and socialist into the preamble.

However, Bhushan's definition of secular as respect for all religions and socialist as lifting up the downtrodden, were not added to the Constitution.

"When it came to other parts of the 42nd Amendment, fortunately, Shanti Bhushan's sagacity came. Secular and socialist were two words that were added to the preamble of our Constitution by the 42nd amendment. He didn't even attempt to get rid of this because it's obvious that this is a secular constitution, and the Directive Principles Chapter shows that it's a socialist constitution. However, he defines secular as meaning equal respect for all religions, and defines socialist as meaning anybody who is downtrodden alone can be lifted up. These two definitions were not passed by the Rajya Sabha, which still had a Congress majority. So though socialist and secular remain, these definitions never came into force in our Constitution. Article 51A fundamental duties was also left untouched and not sought to be done away with," Justice Nariman said.

Shanti Bhushan's son and Senior Advocate Jayant Bhushan and grandson Pawan Bhushan also spoke at the event.

You can watch the full lecture on our YouTube channel here.