On Ambedkar’s birth anniversary, we remember him as a lawyer who became one of India's earliest crusaders for civil rights, long before he led the making of the Constitution. He defended Communists, Congress workers and others whose politics he often disagreed with, against the colonial state's routine use of charges of "sedition," "illegal assembly," and "causing public hardship" to crush dissent. The stakes were never just individual freedom, but civil liberties itself.
Caste, however, shaped his experience in the courtroom. While Jinnah argued a matter worth ₹2.57 lakh, Ambedkar appeared the same day for a schoolteacher in a case valued at ₹24. "There is no hope to gain from legal practice," he said, "because it depends on touchable people." He chose it anyway.
By the 1930s he had become a leading lawyer for trade unionists. When leaders of the All India Textile Workers Conference were charged with organising an illegal strike, his cross-examination led to the confession that the owners refused to negotiate not because demands were unreasonable, but because organisers were "of communist colour." All accused were acquitted.
His fight was not only against colonial repression but against social power, entrenched in the Brahminical hierarchy. In the Chavadar Tank case, savarna Hindus claimed a public tank as private property after violently excluding Dalits — Ambedkar won, the court holding that centuries of exclusion conferred no legal ownership.
His fight also extended to defending civic rights against the 'hurt sentiments' of dominant communities. When the Dalit writer of Deshache Dushman faced defamation for calling Tilak "an enemy of the nation," he argued the defamed was dead and the complainant, no close relative, had no legal standing. When educator Raghunath Karve's journal on sex education was charged with obscenity, he argued it would only reach readers already seeking such knowledge — not the general public the law was designed to protect.
In a world where legal measures are increasingly used to silence marginalized voices, Babasaheb’s legacy is a timely reminder of the power of legal activism.