Leadership Quote by B. R. Ambedkar

A grenade disguised as diagnosis: Ambedkar isn’t nitpicking theology here, he’s indicting a social machine. By claiming Hinduism offers “no scope for development” of conscience, reason, or independent thinking, he attacks the system’s operating logic, not individual believers. The phrasing is intentionally absolute because the target is structural power - a religiously sanctioned hierarchy that, in his view, trains people to obey inherited status rather than interrogate it.

The context matters. Ambedkar spoke as a jurist-politician born into “untouchability,” watching scripture, custom, and everyday ritual fuse into a durable caste regime. In that world, conscience can become a private luxury when public life is arranged to punish moral dissent; reason turns ornamental when social rank is treated as metaphysical fact; independent thinking is recoded as impurity, disloyalty, or chaos. His critique lands because it frames oppression as epistemic: the issue isn’t only what Hindu society does to bodies, but what it does to minds - narrowing the permitted range of doubt.

Subtext: reform is not enough. If the tradition’s core social function is to reproduce graded inequality, then appeals to internal “liberal” resources of Hinduism look, to Ambedkar, like a comforting myth for the privileged. The line also performs political pressure. It forces a choice between ethical modernity and inherited authority, making neutrality feel like complicity. For a constitutional architect arguing for equal citizenship, the claim is meant to shock readers into seeing caste not as a regrettable distortion, but as the point.