Reclaiming Ambedkar for a modern Andhra Pradesh

History has a tendency to reduce towering figures into narrow symbols. B. R. Ambedkar has often been confined to the role of a sectional Neta, when in truth he was the principal architect of modern India’s moral and constitutional imagination. To remember him is not to ritualise his legacy, but to apply it.

Ambedkar warned us that while equality may be aspirational, it must nonetheless guide governance. The test of that principle lies not in rhetoric, but in whether the State actively dismantles structural inequality. In Andhra Pradesh, this meant reimagining public education, healthcare, and governance not as welfare, but as instruments of dignity.