Why did Ambedkar attack the idea of the Indian village?
Because he had lived in it. Many in the Assembly, following a powerful strand of national feeling, wanted the self-governing village to be the foundation stone of the constitution — the pure, communal India on which the modern state should rest. Ambedkar refused the picture flatly. He called the village a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism, and said he was glad the draft had made the individual, not the village, the unit of the constitution.
The disagreement was not academic. For an Untouchable, the village was not a warm community but the tightest cage the caste order had — the place where the well, the street and the temple were closed to you and enforcement was immediate, physical and beyond appeal. What looked from a distance like harmony was, up close, a machinery of exclusion. To romanticise it was to romanticise the very thing his life was spent against.
So he put his faith in the individual citizen and the rights the constitution gave that citizen directly, bypassing the local structures that had always mediated — and blocked — those rights. Whether he was too hard on the village is argued to this day. What is not argued is that the objection came from the inside, from someone reporting what the community felt like to the people it kept out.