In August 1931, during his first formal meeting with Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi at Mani Bhavan in Bombay, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar made a declaration that fundamentally shattered the nationalist illusion of a unified anti-colonial front: “Gandhiji, I have no homeland.” To grasp the profound weight of this statement, one must first interrogate what it truly means to call a place a “homeland.” A homeland is not merely a geographic expanse bounded by political borders, nor is it defined simply by possessing a passport or a constitutional territory. A homeland is a space of radical belonging—a site where an individual can exist freely, with uncompromised dignity and fundamental liberty. In his autobiography, Nelson Mandela captured this primal essence of freedom when he wrote: “I was not born with a hunger to be free. I was born free—free in every way that I could know. Free to run in the fields near my mother’s hut, free to swim in the clear stream that ran through my village, free to roast mealies under the stars and ride the broad backs of slow-moving bulls.” For Mandela, as for any human being, a true homeland is a place where freedom is the natural baseline of existence.

At a time when anti-colonial dissent was at its peak, Ambedkar’s blunt denial of the undisputed leader of the independence struggle was an act of extreme political honesty. It laid bare his genuine sense of alienation on behalf of his people. How could a man claim a homeland in a nation that systematically denied his basic human dignity? For the Untouchables, the daily tyranny of caste Hindu society—expressed through forced segregation, denial of public water, physical violence, and systemic humiliation—was far more immediate, brutal, and historically entrenched than British colonial rule. Ambedkar recognized that while Gandhi fought against British colonialism, the upper-caste leadership was eager to preserve its internal feudal empire. To declare to Gandhi that a country built on social injustice is a prison for its most oppressed people, not a homeland, was an act of profound refusal.

Today, as youth-led demonstrations at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar—organized by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) over widespread NEET paper leaks and national examination irregularities—draw thousands of marchers, CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke and his companions carry “a photo of Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar, M.K. Gandhi, and a copy of the Indian Constitution” to ensure their protests remain peaceful. As mainstream civil society, student unions, and GenZ youth movements routinely frame Gandhi and Ambedkar side-by-side as twin patrons of democratic dissent, an urgent Ambedkarite critique demands to be posed: Has post-colonial India posthumously constructed a “home” for Ambedkar by diluting his radical anti-caste framework into a sanitized, state-sanctioned icon, paired with the very ideology he spent his life dismantling?

It is widely assumed today that Ambedkar eventually found his “home” in the post-colonial Indian Republic. The dominant narrative holds that the drafting of the Constitution, the formal abolition of untouchability under Article 17, and his elevation to national icon status granted him and his people the homeland he was denied in 1931. However, we must critically interrogate the difference between the “home” Ambedkar spoke of then and the “home” offered to his people now. The homeland Ambedkar envisioned was not merely a territorial entity with a flag and a legal code. It was a true social democracy anchored in pratitya-samutpada (interconnectedness), liberty, equality, and fraternity. It was a home where the annihilation of caste restored moral community, dignity, and real political agency to the depressed classes. What the post-colonial Indian state offers instead is a structural illusion: a constitutional home on paper, accompanied by an unchanged Brahminical social order in practice. The state eagerly claims Ambedkar as the “Father of the Constitution” to validate its democratic credentials globally, yet actively strips his memory of its radical, anti-caste methodology.

To claim that Ambedkar or Dalits have found a home in modern India is to ignore their daily lived reality deliberately. Are Dalits no longer facing discrimination? The empirical reality tells a devastating story. The “home” constructed by the modern nation-state remains a site of ongoing, systemic violence for Dalits. Untouchability has not vanished; it has merely adapted to modernity. When a Dalit …