Politics & Power Quote by B. R. Ambedkar

Ambedkar is puncturing a comforting liberal myth: that the state is the main villain and elections are the main cure. He ranks “social tyranny” above “political tyranny” because he knows which one actually reaches your body, your kitchen, your marriage, your water source. Government oppression can be brutal, but it is at least legible - laws, offices, chains of command. Social power is diffuse, intimate, and self-renewing. It doesn’t need a police baton when neighbors, priests, landlords, and even relatives can enforce hierarchy with shame, exclusion, and everyday violence.

The line is also a rebuke to the glamour of political dissent. Defying “Government” can be a career move; history loves the brave legislator and the televised protest. Defying “society” means risking total social death: boycotts, broken livelihoods, threats that never make it into official records. Ambedkar is elevating the reformer because the reformer fights the arena where caste actually lives - not as an ideology, but as a social operating system.

Context matters: Ambedkar wasn’t theorizing from a safe distance. As a Dalit leader and the chief architect of India’s Constitution, he understood the limits of formal rights when the social order refuses to recognize your personhood. The subtext is a warning to constitutional democracies: you can draft emancipatory laws and still leave the deeper machinery intact. Freedom isn’t only a matter of changing who rules; it’s changing how people are allowed to live with one another.