Politics & Power Quote by B. R. Ambedkar

A grenade disguised as a civics lesson, Ambedkar’s line stages India as a country living under a split-screen reality. On one side sits the Constitution’s preamble, a modern promise of liberty, equality, fraternity. On the other sits the “social ideal” carried by religion, which he argues actively withholds those same values. The bluntness is the point: he isn’t pleading for harmony between the two; he’s exposing their incompatibility as the central political problem of the new republic.

The specific intent is prosecutorial. Ambedkar, as the chief architect of the Constitution and a lifelong critic of caste hierarchy, is warning that political democracy cannot survive on paper alone. By calling them “two different ideologies,” he rejects the comforting notion that constitutional rights will automatically seep into everyday life. If society is organized around graded inequality, elections and legal equality become a thin modern varnish over an older order.

The subtext is sharper than an anti-religious provocation. “Religion” here is shorthand for sanctified social power: customs, family structures, village life, temple access, marriage markets, and the moral alibis that make exclusion feel righteous. He’s naming how oppression persists not just through the state but through consensus, ritual, and the policing of belonging.

Context matters: this is a Dalit leader speaking at the birth of independent India, trying to weld a democratic constitution onto a society still structured by caste. The quote works because it forces a choice. Either the Constitution remakes social life, or social life quietly nullifies the Constitution.