AS A CHILD in Western India near the turn of the 20th century, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was forced to sit outside his classroom and prohibited from drinking water from the school well because he was Dalit, the social caste formerly known as “untouchable.”
He was able to attend school at all only because his father worked for the British Indian Army. Though he went on to study at Columbia University and the London School of Economics, becoming the first Indian to earn a PhD in economics abroad, when he returned to India, he found that no landlord would rent his family an apartment because of their caste. Even though he became the primary author of the Constitution of India, and the first minister of law and justice, Ambedkar would be at once galvanized and haunted by caste discrimination for the rest of his life.
In 1949, as India prepared to formally adopt its constitution, Ambedkar spoke to the assembly of lawmakers who had been drafting the document with him for three years. “Will she maintain her independence,” he asked of his homeland and its representatives, “or will she lose it again?” He called for a “social democracy,” even as he also emphasized that India lacked both equality and fraternity. “It is quite possible,” Ambedkar warned, “for this new-born democracy to retain its form but give place to dictatorship in fact.”
