What BR Ambedkar means for today's India

The dissonance between political equality and social disparity is the lived reality for millions of citizens in modern India. Resolving it requires sustained political engagement, not rhetoric

- Dhrubo Jyoti

If someone from the 1960s were sitting in the visitor's gallery of the Lok Sabha over the weekend, they'd likely have been shocked by the phalanx of lawmakers cutting across party and ideology swearing their allegiance to BR Ambedkar.

Just a decade after the towering constitutionalist died in 1956, his legacy had all but been erased from the political mainstream - a task accomplished by the collective contribution of every major political party at the time.

Kept alive through the sacrifice and dedication of grassroots followers, the edifice of Babasaheb Ambedkar's legacy was built more painstakingly than any other major leader of his time.

Four decades passed after his death before the government saw fit to confer the nation's highest civilian honour on the man who steered the Republic's founding document.

It took a generation, countless attacks by upper castes, the razing of villages and people being burnt to death for a state government to add his name to a university, that too after 16 years of protests.

And it took nearly half a century for governments to begin preserving the buildings and places where India's first law minister worked.

If it seems to some that Babasaheb's followers unnecessarily deify him, it is because of their lingering memory of this unsavoury history.

In a society riven by inequality where biased strictures governed not just human beings but also their shadows, interventions by Babasaheb in the Constitution attempted to level the playing field and ensure that every citizen's right to political equality was matched by a similar claim to equality on the social plane.