What did "fraternity" mean to Ambedkar, and why did he insist on it?
He treated liberty, equality and fraternity as a single thing with three names, and warned against separating them. Liberty without equality, he said, lets the strong dominate; equality without liberty kills individual initiative; and neither can be made to hold without fraternity, which is the sense of a shared life among people who regard one another as fellows. Fraternity is the one that cannot be legislated — it is a disposition, not a clause — which is exactly why he thought it the hardest and the most necessary.
He was insistent that he did not take this trinity from the French Revolution. He took it, he said, from the Buddha — from a teacher who preached a community of equals bound by regard for one another rather than by birth. The choice of ancestry mattered to him: it made the ideal Indian and ancient, not borrowed and modern, and it tied his politics to the faith he ended his life in.
Fraternity is also his answer to caste at its deepest level. Caste is the systematic denial of fraternity — a rule that some people are not your fellows and never can be. To build fraternity is therefore not sentimentality but the precise reversal of the thing he fought: the making of one people out of a society engineered to stay many.