“The Ambedkar That Today’s ‘Ambedkarites’ Don’t Quote Part 3”, MyIndMakers, Aug 12, 2026.
“Introduction
No figure is invoked more often, by more sides of the SC-reservation debate, than Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. Organisations campaigning for the extension of Scheduled Caste status to Dalit converts to Christianity and Islam routinely present their cause as the fulfilment of Ambedkar’s unfinished project. This is a serious historical claim, and it deserves to be tested against what Ambedkar actually wrote, said, and did across the two decades in which he thought hardest about exactly this question — the period between his public 1935 declaration that he would not die a Hindu, and his eventual conversion, in 1956, to a religion he chose specifically because it was neither Islam nor Christianity.
The Long Deliberation: 1935 to 1956
In 1935, at Yeola, Ambedkar publicly announced that although he had been born a Hindu, he would not die one. What followed was not an impulsive act but a sustained, two-decade intellectual investigation into which faith, if any, could deliver genuine social liberation to India’s Dalit communities. He studied Hinduism’s internal reform possibilities, Sikhism, Islam, and Christianity in turn, weighing each against a single test he considered decisive for any religion: what mental and moral relief does it actually offer the oppressed and the downtrodden?
He seriously considered Sikhism for a period, drawn to its explicit doctrinal rejection of caste. Still, he ultimately hesitated over practical and political concerns about how a mass Dalit conversion into the Sikh community would be institutionally absorbed. Islam and Christianity, the two other major faiths available to him, he examined in considerable depth and in both cases, he ultimately declined to recommend them to the community he led. This was not indecision. It was a considered rejection, grounded in specific findings he set out in his own writing, most extensively in his 1940 work Pakistan or the Partition of India…………………..”
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