BR Ambedkar Jayanti: 10 timeless quotes by the architect of India’s Constitution

Ambedkar Jayanti is also known as Bhim Jayanti and is celebrated as a public holiday across.

India since 2015 to celebrate the champion of Dalit rights and the principal architect of the Indian Constitution, Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, who was born on April 14, 1891 in Madhya Pradesh’s Mhow. He is fondly called Babasaheb by his followers and each year, his birth anniversary is celebrated as Ambedkar Jayanti to honour his countless contributions in the making of the present-day independent India where people pay their respects to Dr BR Ambedkar by offering flowers, lighting candles and organising cultural events.

Dr BR Ambedkar was an Indian jurist, economist, social reformer and politician and is best known as the chief architect of the Indian Constitution. He belonged to the Mahar caste which was considered untouchable in Hinduism but converted to Buddhism on October 14, 1956, in Nagpur, along with 500,000 supporters, after studying the religion for years and is not only known for his great influence in eradicating the social scourge of untouchability in India but also for having led a crusade for the upliftment and empowerment of Dalits in the country since he believed that Dalits can never get their rights within Hinduism.

Due to his Mahar caste since childhood, Dr BR Ambedkar witnessed economic and social discrimination before converting to Buddhism and most of these painful experiences that honed Babasaheb’s life have been penned down by him in his autobiographical book ‘Waiting For A Visa’. It was on August 29, 1947, that he was appointed as the chairman of the Constitution Drafting Committee for the constitution of independent India and after Independence, he was appointed as the law minister of India.

By writing the Indian Constitution, he not only broke the social conventions meant for Hindu Shudras to emulate caste supremacists, changed their mindsets and urged them to educate and fight for their rights and gave equal rights to all but also ended the monopoly of Hindu Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Vaishyas – in education, military, trade, social standards – who deemed themselves as superior to Shudras or the untouchables. From publishing scores of journals and advocating for Dalits rights to making significant contributions toward the establishment of the state of India, drafting of the Indian Constitution, giving ideas that served as the foundation of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and playing a crucial role in promoting gender equality, Dr BR Ambedkar dedicated most of his life to empowering and voicing concerns for the downtrodden.

On his 133rd birth anniversary this Sunday, here are some inspiring quotes by Dr Babasaheb Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar to fuel our motivation:

1. “Cultivation of mind should be the ultimate aim of human existence.”

2. “I measure the progress of a community by the degree of progress which women have achieved.”

3. “Life should be great rather than long.”

4. “Men are mortal. So are ideas. An idea needs propagation as much as a plant needs watering. Otherwise, both will wither and die.”

5. “I like the religion that teaches liberty, equality, and fraternity.”

6. “Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy.”

7. “Law and order are the medicine of the body politic and when the body politic gets sick, medicine must be administered.”

8. “Democracy is not merely a form of government. It is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.”

9. “Lost rights are never regained by appeals to the conscience of the usurpers, but by relentless struggle.”

10. “Unlike a drop of water which loses its identity when it joins the ocean, man does not lose his being in the society in which he lives. Man’s life is independent. He is born not for the development of the society alone, but for the development of his self.”