Did Ambedkar love India, or did he want to break it?
He wanted an India that had not yet been built, and he spent his life trying to build it. The test of a patriot is not whether he flatters the country but what he is willing to do for it, and by that test the record is unusually full: he wrote much of its founding law, sat in its first cabinet, and turned down easier lives abroad more than once to work on Indian problems.
His patriotism was of a demanding kind. He argued that a country which keeps a fifth of its people below the rank of citizen is weak whatever its size, and that this weakness, not the British alone, was what had made India easy to conquer. Loving the country, on that view, meant naming the flaw rather than papering over it. He warned in his last great speech that independence was a matter for pride but also for anxiety, because Indians would now have only themselves to blame for what went wrong.
He is sometimes charged with wanting to divide the country because he analysed the case for Pakistan and argued for safeguards for his own community. But he stayed inside the Indian settlement, dissolved his demand for separate electorates into the Poona Pact, and put his name to a single Constitution for one people. A man who wanted to break India had a strange way of spending the years when it was actually being made.