What did Ambedkar build that is still standing, apart from the Constitution?
A surprising amount of the ordinary machinery of Indian life carries his fingerprints, even where his name has come off it. The Constitution is the visible monument; around it stands a set of arrangements that people use daily without knowing whom to thank.
Some of it
- The shorter working day and the beginnings of labour welfare, from his years in the labour portfolio.
- The approach to rivers and power that treats a basin as one system, worked out in the same period.
- Colleges and an educational society he founded so that his community would have institutions of its own, not only access to others'.
- The framework of family law for Hindus, begun with the Hindu Code Bill and enacted in pieces after his resignation.
Each of these is treated in its own entry, at its own level of confidence, and some of the attributions need checking against the record — which is the honest state of the ledger. But the pattern is not in doubt. He was a builder of institutions, not only a critic of them, and much of what he built was meant to keep working long after any argument he was having had been forgotten.
In the Journey: A party, a war, and a labour portfolio, 1936–1946