Ambedkar Jayanti 2026: Why reading his work carefully is important today

The appropriation of B.R. Ambedkar remains central to the project of the current regime trying to make inroads into the Dalit electorate. His intellectual legacy is sought to be decontextualised and refashioned to suit current political agendas. Ambedkar’s Political Philosophy: A Grammar of Public Life from the Social Margins by political philosopher Prof. Valerian Rodrigues seeks to (re)situate Ambedkarite thought in its socio-political, and more importantly, moral context. The book takes the position that Ambedkar cannot be reduced to a political leader; he is a philosopher and thinker whose work speaks to the marginalised in any society. Rodrigues foregrounds the political frame that makes Ambedkar ask the difficult questions that the Congress party often expediently overlooked in the name of anti-colonial unity and then post-colonial consensus.

The work stands alongside recent works on Ambedkar, both biographical and analytical. V. Geetha’s Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India explains Ambedkar’s contentious relationship with communists in India (both within the Congress and without). He thought that socialism had immense emancipatory potential and proposed a parliamentary socialist structure for independent India in States and Minorities. At the same time, he thought that Indian communists, owing to ignorance about caste, did not understand that Brahmanism is not just a historical relic but an ever-evolving reactionary socio-intellectual force.