Leadership Quote by B. R. Ambedkar

Ambedkar isn’t picking a fight with faith so much as with authority. The operative word is “sovereignty”: he’s arguing that sacred texts can’t sit above the state if the state is meant to belong equally to everyone. In a country as densely plural as India, scripture-as-supreme-law doesn’t produce harmony; it produces competing jurisdictions, each claiming divine veto power over civic life. The sentence is built like a condition, not a provocation: “must come to an end if we want…” It frames secular modernity as a practical requirement, not a Western affectation.

The subtext is Ambedkar’s lifelong confrontation with caste. For him, religious scripture wasn’t a private solace; it was a public technology of hierarchy, used to naturalize exclusion and block reform. “United integrated modern India” is less a slogan than a constitutional thesis: citizenship has to be the primary identity, or else community becomes destiny. His choice of “integrated” hints at the danger of a patchwork nation where personal laws, clerical power, and inherited social order quietly override equal rights.

Context sharpens the edge. Writing and speaking in the decades around independence and constitution-making, Ambedkar was staring down the question of what would rule the new republic: democratic legislation or inherited religious command. His intent is unapologetically state-centric: not to erase religions, but to demote their texts from sovereign to symbolic, so the Constitution can be the one scripture everyone is compelled to share.