What is "Navayana" Buddhism, and how is it Ambedkar's own?
Navayana means, roughly, the new vehicle — a name for the reading of Buddhism that Ambedkar worked out and left in the book published just after his death, The Buddha and His Dhamma. It is Buddhism turned towards this world and towards reason. Where older schools carry doctrines of rebirth, karma across lives, the soul and elaborate cosmology, his version quietly sets those aside and keeps the ethical core: the analysis of suffering and the discipline for ending it, read as a guide to conduct here and now.
He also read the Buddha as a social teacher, whose deepest quarrel was with the graded inequality of his own society — which made the faith, in Ambedkar's hands, an answer to caste rather than a retreat from the world. This is why he could present conversion as both a spiritual and a political act at once: the religion he was joining was, on his interpretation, built around the equality he wanted.