On a quiet morning in July 2022, Droupadi Murmu took the oath of office as the 15th President of the Republic of India. For the first time in 75 years of Indian democracy, the person administering that oath was a woman from a Scheduled Tribe community, born in a remote corner of Odisha’s Mayurbhanj district, who had known poverty as a lived experience. When Murmu pressed her forehead to the Constitution before signing, many wept — not from sentiment, but from recognition. This is what inclusion looks like when it is not a slogan, but a decision.It is no coincidence that this moment arrived under Narendra Modi. For if there is one truth that Babasaheb Ambedkar bequeathed to this republic, it is this: Constitutional morality is not self-executing. It requires political will, institutional courage, and leaders willing to defy the comfortable consensus of the powerful in favour of the long-excluded.AdvertisementAlso Read | Narendra Modi writes: We owe it to nari shakti to come together to advance women’s representationIn 1956, the First Backward Classes Commission, chaired by Kaka Kalelkar, submitted its landmark report identifying 2,399 backward communities and recommending comprehensive affirmative action. The Congress government rejected it. The reasons were characteristically obscure — political expediency dressed in the language of administrative complexity. The Other Backward Classes, whose dignity Ambedkar had championed, were left waiting.Five years later, in 1961, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru wrote his now-infamous letter on reservations, expressing discomfort with the policy and suggesting that it risked promoting “inefficiency.” The letter was a window into elite upper-caste anxiety masquerading as technocratic concern. Nehru, who admired Ambedkar in public, was quietly resistant to the structural redistribution of opportunity that Ambedkar had demanded.The pattern deepened under Indira Gandhi. The Mandal Commission, constituted in 1979 under the Janata government and tasked with identifying OBC communities deserving of reservation, submitted its report in 1980. For the entire decade of the 1980s — under Indira Gandhi and then Rajiv Gandhi — the report gathered dust. It was a deliberate act of suppression. The political arithmetic of Congress required that OBC aspirations be managed rather than fulfilled.AdvertisementThen came the moment that crystallised Congress’s posture with brutal clarity. In 1990, when Prime Minister V P Singh finally moved to implement the Mandal Commission’s recommendations, Rajiv Gandhi rose in Parliament to deliver what became one of the longest speeches in the history of the Lok Sabha — a sustained, elaborate opposition to OBC reservation. The man who had inherited the Congress leadership from Nehru and Indira Gandhi now stood before the nation’s legislature to argue against the very policy that was Ambedkar’s core demand. It was, in its way, a confession.Ambedkar understood that social justice could not be achieved without gender justice. His insistence on women’s rights was central to his constitutional project. He resigned from Nehru’s Cabinet in 1951 precisely because the Hindu Code Bill — which sought to codify women’s rights in inheritance and divorce — was being diluted and delayed. He saw the patriarchal resistance within Congress for what it was.Congress’s record on women’s rights has been consistent with this inheritance. In 1985, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of Shah Bano Begum, a 73-year-old Muslim woman seeking maintenance from her husband after divorce. The Rajiv Gandhi government, succumbing to conservative religious pressure, passed the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986, effectively nullifying the judgment.The Women’s Reservation Bill tells another story of Congress obstruction. For nearly two decades, from 1996 to 2014, the bill was introduced and defeated repeatedly in Parliament. The darkest single moment came in 1998, when RJD Member of Parliament Surendra Prakash Yadav physically snatched the bill and tore it up on the floor of the House — a Congress ally performing, in theatrical violence, what Congress enabled through political calculation. In 2010, when a version of the bill was introduced in the Rajya Sabha, Mulayam Singh Yadav, a long-standing Congress partner, made derogatory and contemptuous remarks about women’s participation in politics. The Congress establishment’s silence was its endorsement.Against this backdrop, the record of the Modi government takes on a qualitatively different character. What distinguishes the past decade is not merely symbolic representation — though symbolism matters enormously in a society structured by the stigma of caste — but the installation of historically excluded communities in positions of genuine institutional power.Droupadi Murmu as President is the most visible marker of this shift, but it is not the only one. For the first time in the history of Indian Railways, a Dalit officer was appointed as Chairman of the Railway Board. For the first time, a tribal officer was appointed as Comptroller and Auditor General of India. These are positions that exercise real authority over real resources. At the level of state governance, two Adivasi CMs have been sworn in — in Odisha and Chhattisgarh. In Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, Dalit leaders have been appointed as deputy CMs.you may likeThe passage of the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam in September 2023 — reserving one-third of seats in the Lok Sabha and state legislative assemblies for women — was the legislative fulfilment of what Ambedkar had demanded, and Congress had denied for 60 years.The Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam is not merely a women’s rights legislation. It is, read properly, the completion of Ambedkar’s constitutional project. Babasaheb had insisted in the Constituent Assembly debates that political equality without social equality was a contradiction in terms. The Women’s Reservation Act is the legislature’s belated answer to that demand.On Ambedkar Jayanti, the ritual invocations will be many. Garlands will be placed. But the real tribute to Ambedkar is not the commemoration of his memory but the continuation of his project.The writer is national spokesperson, BJP