Ambedkar was repeatedly humiliated early on because he was born a Mahar. Eating, drinking, renting - everything was impacted. But there were exceptions. The name Ambedkar was given by a Brahmin teacher and so was a recommendation to Maharaja of Baroda who financed his education.

Those wise and kind Indians did enough that Ambedkar, who should still get the most credit of course, never gave up on a civilisational view of India and a capacious view of Dharma. Despite all his justified bitterness he was magnanimous enough to not try to wreck this Sanskriti.

Ambedkar earned multiple degrees and doctorates in a short period of time - he was on a scholarship/stipend and he was expected to come back and “repay” it with some ministerial type service. He was an erudite prodigy with an eclectic set of interests. His real passion was India.

Ambedkar was clear. He chose Buddhism and not Islam/Christianity because he did not want to “denationalise” the Dalits. People criticise his form of Buddhism but I think it was more a symbolic gesture of one final rebellion. If he really wanted to break apart, he knew what to do.

He wanted to see a final rejection of birth based caste Hinduism in his lifetime. But by choosing Buddhism he was essentially giving some time to India and Dharma to get our act together. Ambedkar understood that economics, society and politics cannot be divorced from each other.

As Ambedkar said, God is for Man and not Man for God. Religions do have transcendental and priceless values for individuals - but for societies they must have an instrumental value as well. We just cannot have political liberty when we have deep rooted socio-economic oppressions.

Things are much better today, though discrimination is still very real and in a large country one can find it daily. It is also true that as one kind of discrimination lessens it becomes even more intolerable counterintuitively. Ambedkarites, Ambedkar himself do not always agree.

People have criticised Ambedkar for not being focused on the freedom struggle. But for Ambedkar key issue was what will political freedom mean without social reform. Even today we see casteists being proud of nothing but their birth though increasingly less so; imagine back then.

I am ever thankful that Gandhi was able to stop Ambedkar from getting Dalit separate electorates, but the question to ask is why did Gandhi, the Nehrus and even Tilak agree to the same for the Muslims? And once they did what exactly were they expecting given the ground realities?

To see today Dharmic civilisational forces getting wide political support from Dalit (officially, SC) communities shows the progress we have made. But there is no scope for complacency. There are many enemies ready to jump on real and fake atrocities. We must have a bigger heart.